Delhi High Court Denies ANI's Interim Injunction Against OpenAI
The Delhi High Court on July 24 dismissed ANI's application for an interim injunction against OpenAI in its copyright case. In the oral ruling, Justice Amit Bansal said ANI had not shown prima facie infringement from storage or substantially similar ChatGPT outputs; the court also accepted jurisdiction. The underlying suit continues, and the detailed order had not yet been published when reports appeared.
The Delhi High Court on July 24 dismissed Asian News International's application for an interim injunction against OpenAI. The ruling is an important procedural decision in India's first major copyright case over the training and output of a generative AI system, but it does not end the underlying lawsuit.
LiveLaw reported that Justice Amit Bansal found, at this preliminary stage, that OpenAI's storage of ANI's works fell within the research exception in Section 52(1)(a) of India's Copyright Act. The court also found that the ChatGPT outputs placed before it were not substantially similar to ANI's works and that ANI had not demonstrated memorization or regurgitation sufficient to justify interim relief.
What the court decided
The court rejected ANI's request to restrain OpenAI while the case proceeds. It also ruled in ANI's favor on territorial jurisdiction, according to LiveLaw, meaning the dispute can continue before the Delhi High Court even though OpenAI had argued that its models were not trained and its servers were not located in India.
That distinction matters. Denial of an interim injunction is not a final judgment that all model training on copyrighted material is lawful. It is a preliminary assessment of the evidence and legal arguments presented for urgent relief. LiveLaw said the detailed written order was still awaited when it published its report; The Hindu and Reuters separately reported the dismissal.
What remains unresolved
ANI's suit alleges that OpenAI used its copyrighted news material without permission and that ChatGPT reproduced or falsely attributed content to the agency. OpenAI has argued that training is transformative, that facts are not protected by copyright, and that the outputs cited by ANI do not reproduce protected expression. Those broader claims remain part of the pending case.
For AI teams operating in India, the ruling is a signal rather than a complete compliance rule. The eventual written reasoning and later merits decision will matter for how courts distinguish non-expressive analysis from protected reproduction, assess evidence of memorization, and apply India's narrower fair-dealing exceptions to commercial model development. Until then, practitioners should not treat the interim result as a blanket authorization for training-data use.
Key Points
- 1The Delhi High Court dismissed ANI's request for an interim injunction against OpenAI on July 24, while allowing the underlying copyright suit to continue.
- 2At the preliminary stage, the court found no sufficient showing of substantially similar output or memorization and accepted jurisdiction over the dispute.
- 3The detailed written order was still awaited, so the ruling should not be treated as a final or blanket decision on AI training and copyright in India.
Scoring Rationale
The interim ruling materially advances India's first major generative-AI copyright case and addresses training, output similarity and jurisdiction, but it is preliminary and the detailed written order and merits decision remain outstanding.
Sources
Public references used for this report.
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