Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

ByIvan Jenic

The publisher of the world’s oldest English-language encyclopedia is taking OpenAI to federal court.

Encyclopedia Britannica claims the artificial intelligence company illegally trained its language models on nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles.

dictionary sues openai
Image: Pexels

Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster officially filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The publishers submitted the copyright and trademark infringement complaint in the federal court of Manhattan.

Key Takeaways:

  • The core allegation: The lawsuit claims OpenAI scraped nearly 100,000 online articles to train its language models. The publishers state the artificial intelligence company completed this massive data extraction without seeking permission or offering compensation.
  • The output problem: The complaint details how ChatGPT directly reproduces Britannica content. The models allegedly use a retrieval-augmented generation process to output verbatim copies of encyclopedia entries and dictionary definitions.
  • The trademark violation: The publishers accuse OpenAI of violating the Lanham Act. The lawsuit claims ChatGPT generates fabricated information and falsely attributes those hallucinations directly to Britannica.
  • The broader context: This legal action joins a massive wave of litigation against OpenAI. Major publishers like The New York Times and Ziff Davis are already suing the company over identical training data practices.
  • The Perplexity precedent: Britannica is aggressively defending its intellectual property. The publisher filed an essentially parallel complaint against the AI search engine Perplexity in September 2025.

The Bottom Line: Encyclopedia Britannica wants a federal judge to stop OpenAI from using its copyrighted reference materials to generate answers for ChatGPT users.

Source: Techputs

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