The dictionary sues OpenAI

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging massive copyright infringement involving nearly 100,000 online articles used to train LLMs without permission. The suit also claims OpenAI violates copyright when generating verbatim reproductions of their content and when using their articles in ChatGPT's RAG workflow. Additionally, Britannica alleges OpenAI violates the Lanham Act by producing hallucinations falsely attributed to the publisher. The case joins a growing wave of publisher lawsuits against OpenAI, including from the New York Times, Ziff Davis, and numerous newspapers. A similar Britannica lawsuit against Perplexity is also pending. Legal precedent on LLM training and copyright remains unsettled, though Anthropic recently reached a $1.5 billion settlement in a related case.