OpenAI vs ANI: Delhi High Court Declines Immediate Ex‑Parte Injunction

On Tuesday, a two‑judge bench of the Delhi High Court pushed back against a hurried request to halt OpenAI’s use of news agency ANI’s articles for training its ChatGPT model. The judges, Avneesh Jhingan and Manmeet P.S. Arora, made it clear they were not comfortable issuing an ex‑parte order without hearing the other side.

ANI had approached the court after a single‑judge decision on July 24 dismissed its plea for an injunction. That earlier ruling leaned on the “fair dealing” carve‑out in Indian copyright law, suggesting OpenAI’s data‑scraping might fall within permissible research or private‑use limits.

During the hearing, ANI’s counsel, Siddhant Kumar, reminded the bench that OpenAI had voluntarily stopped pulling content from the agency’s site from September 2024 until the July order. He urged the judges to keep that arrangement in place while the dispute is sorted out.

The bench, however, chose a more measured path. It issued a formal notice to OpenAI, set a future date—December 5—for the next hearing, and emphasised that any restraining order would have to come after both parties have been heard.

ANI’s appeal centres on what it describes as an outright breach of its exclusive rights under the Copyright Act: the right to store, reproduce, adapt and translate its original material. The agency argues that the earlier judgment stretched the “fair dealing” exception far beyond its intended scope, effectively green‑lighting commercial exploitation of its work.

OpenAI, for its part, has not yet filed a detailed response, but the court’s decision signals that the company will get a chance to argue that its data‑training practices are lawful and fall within recognised exceptions. The case remains a litmus test for how Indian courts will balance copyright protection with the growing appetite for AI‑driven content generation.