OpenAI Tells Delhi High Court: We Have No Permanent Office In India; No Legal Obligation

OpenAI Tells Delhi High Court: We Have No Permanent Office In India; No Legal Obligation

States said that complying with ANI's request would violate its legal obligations in the US

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has challenged the jurisdiction of the Delhi High Court in a copyright lawsuit filed by the news agency ANI. The Microsoft-backed company argued that the court lacked jurisdiction as OpenAI had no presence in India.

The Microsoft-supported company said that complying with ANI's request would violate its legal obligations in the US. It stated, “OpenAi is under a legal obligation to preserve, and not delete the said training data.”

The firm added, “We have no office or permanent establishment in India. The servers on which (ChatGPT) stores its training data are also situated outside India."

However, ANI countered OpenAI's arguments, asserting that the high court had the jurisdiction to hear the case.

The Indian news agency had alleged that OpenAI used its content without permission to train ChatGPT.

On the other hand, OpenAl maintained that its use of publicly available data for training Al models fell within the scope of fair use.

Earlier, OpenAI had told the court it would not use ANI's content. However, the news agency claimed that its published works were stored in ChatGPT's memory and should be deleted.

The lawsuit follows several similar legal challenges faced by OpenAI and other Al companies, including the prominent case by The New York Times.

OpenAI had entered into content licensing agreements with several major news organizations, including Time magazine, the Financial Times, and Axel Springer.

This raised concerns for ANI, which argued that the firm’s partnerships created an unfair competitive advantage for OpenAI. It accused OpenAI of reproducing verbatim or substantially similar extracts of their work within ChatGPT's outputs.