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The case, lodged in a federal court in Manhattan, also names Britannica’s dictionary subsidiary Merriam-Webster as a co-complainant.
In its complaint [pdf], Britannica claims that OpenAI copied nearly 100,000 articles and reference entries from its platforms without permission. It argues that this material was used to train large language models (LLMs), which now generate responses that can resemble or reproduce its content.
The publisher says this practice has harmed its business by diverting web traffic away from its own platforms.
“ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],” the lawsuit states.
Britannica also alleges that some AI-generated responses include “full or partial verbatim reproductions” of its work, raising concerns about copyright infringement.
A key issue in the case centres on OpenAI’s use of retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a technique that allows AI systems to pull in up-to-date information from external sources. Britannica claims that this system improperly incorporates its content into responses.
It also alleges violations of US trademark law, arguing that the AI sometimes produces incorrect information, known as hallucinations, and attributes them to Britannica.
The company is seeking unspecified financial damages, as well as a court order to prevent further alleged misuse of its materials.
In a statement, OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and operate within legal boundaries.
“Our models empower innovation and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” a spokesperson said.
Britannica is the latest in a series of publishers and media organisations taking legal action against OpenAI. Others include The New York Times and Ziff Davis, alongside multiple North American newspapers.
A separate lawsuit filed by Britannica against AI firm Perplexity AI is still ongoing.
The case comes amid continuing uncertainty over how copyright law applies to AI.
AI companies, including OpenAI, have consistently argued that training models on large datasets constitutes “fair use” because the output is transformative rather than a direct reproduction.
In 2025, US federal judge William Alsup ruled in a separate case involving Anthropic that training AI models on copyrighted books could qualify as fair use if the process is sufficiently transformative.However, the same ruling found Anthropic liable for illegally downloading millions of books, leading to a $1.5bn settlement for authors.
“We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages,” Judge Alsup wrote in the decision.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages.”
