Mar 17, 2026 11:18:00

The Encyclopedia Britannica has sued OpenAI, alleging that it used its copyrighted material without permission.

It has been revealed that Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster have sued OpenAI, alleging that their copyrighted works were used without permission for AI training.

BRITTANICA OPENAI LAWSUIT complaint.pdf
(PDF file)

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/klpylzoekvg/BRITTANICA%20OPENAI%20LAWSUIT%20complaint.pdf

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue OpenAI
https://thenextweb.com/news/britannica-merriam-webster-openai-lawsuit-copyright

The lawsuit filed on March 13, 2026, alleges that OpenAI has caused substantial damage to various publishers by using their copyrighted works without permission to train 'ChatGPT' and by reproducing the content of those works.

Both companies claim that OpenAI used approximately 100,000 online articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica as training data. They stated that only OpenAI itself knows the full extent of the copying.

The technology media outlet The Next Web points out that this lawsuit is based primarily on two legal elements.

One issue is copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976. The Encyclopedia Britannica argued that OpenAI scraped websites to create training data, used that content to train its models, and that ChatGPT generated output that reproduced or very similarly summarized the content of Encyclopedia Britannica articles when answering user questions, which violated copyright law.

The second issue is trademark infringement under

the Lanham Act (Trademark Act) . Britannica argued that presenting ChatGPT's answers alongside trademarks of Britannica and Merriam-Webster could mislead users into believing that those answers were from or endorsed by both companies. In particular, they argued that AI answers may contain errors or hallucinations, and that a brand built on accuracy could suffer reputational damage from misinformation provided by AI.

The Encyclopedia Britannica discontinued its print encyclopedia in 2012 and transitioned entirely to digital. While the quality and originality of its online content have become core assets of the business, its business model is threatened as users begin to obtain information from AI without visiting either company's website. The Encyclopedia Britannica pointed this out, arguing that 'OpenAI is disregarding intellectual property rights and should be held accountable for the significant damages caused by its infringement and the profits it has gained from them.'

The Encyclopedia Britannica and others have also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic with almost the same content.

Britannica, a prestigious dictionary publisher, sues AI search engine Perplexity for copyright and trademark infringement - GIGAZINE