Delhi HC rules OpenAI fair dealing

The India — Delhi High Court issued an interim order on July 24, 2026, in the copyright lawsuit filed by Asian News International (ANI) against OpenAI. Justice Ankit Bansal held that OpenAI's storage and use of ANI's news content to train its large language model (LLM) is prima facie protected by the fair dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Indian Copyright Act, and therefore does not constitute infringement. The court also found that ChatGPT outputs, including those using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), were not substantially similar to ANI's original works. However, the court ruled that Indian courts have territorial jurisdiction over the dispute, allowing the underlying claims to proceed to trial. The case is India's first major judicial test of generative AI and copyright, with interventions from the Federation of Indian Publishers, Digital News Publishers Association, and Indian Music Industry. The ruling sets a precedent for AI training on publicly available data in India, while the global debate continues with similar lawsuits in the US and Canada, and regulatory developments in the UK and EU.