The Britannica OpenAI lawsuit, filed on 13 March 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York (case no. 1:2026cv02097), accuses OpenAI of using copyrighted content from both publishers as artificial intelligence training data without permission. Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster are the plaintiffs in the case.
The complaint alleges that OpenAI used nearly 100,000 of Britannica’s online articles as training inputs for its language models. The full extent of the copying, the complaint acknowledges, is known only to OpenAI itself. Britannica argues that the law does not permit OpenAI’s systematic disregard for its intellectual property rights.
Two Legal Pillars: Copyright and Trademark
The Britannica OpenAI lawsuit rests on two legal frameworks. The first is copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976. Britannica argues OpenAI violated those rights by scraping its websites, feeding that content into its models during training, and generating outputs that reproduce or closely summarise the originals when users query ChatGPT.
The second pillar involves trademark law under the Lanham Act. The complaint argues that OpenAI misleads users by presenting AI-generated responses — which may contain inaccuracies or hallucinations — alongside Britannica’s and Merriam-Webster’s brand identities. Britannica’s reputation rests on accuracy built over more than 250 years, and the complaint contends that associating that brand with AI-fabricated information causes direct reputational harm.
“ChatGPT then provides narrative responses to user queries that often contain verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgements of original content, including plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
From the complaint, case no. 1:2026cv02097
The Business Model Under Pressure
Britannica’s business today is primarily digital, built on subscriptions and advertising revenue that depend on web traffic. The complaint describes ChatGPT as diverting value from Britannica’s content to OpenAI without compensation. Britannica discontinued its 32-volume print edition in 2012, fully transitioning to digital, making its editorial content the central asset of the business.
The complaint frames OpenAI’s alleged copying as an existential threat to a model that cannot survive if the economic returns from that content flow to AI platforms rather than to its creators. Britannica was founded in Edinburgh in 1768 and has maintained editorial standards for more than 250 years.
The Perplexity Precedent
This is not Britannica’s first such case. In September 2025, the same plaintiffs filed a parallel complaint against Perplexity, the AI-powered answer engine, also in the Southern District of New York. That complaint alleged that Perplexity scraped Britannica’s content in real time, bypassing robots.txt protections. The Perplexity case is still proceeding.
The OpenAI case arrives in a more complex legal landscape. OpenAI is already the subject of a large multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the SDNY, overseen by Judge Sidney Stein, that consolidates more than a dozen copyright lawsuits brought by news publishers including the New York Times. Analysts tracking the litigation have noted that the Britannica-OpenAI case will very likely be transferred to that MDL and stayed pending its outcome, meaning a resolution could be years away.
Broader AI Copyright Litigation Landscape
The Britannica OpenAI lawsuit brings the total number of copyright lawsuits filed against AI companies in the United States to 91, according to the ChatGPT Is Eating the World legal tracker. OpenAI had not publicly responded to the complaint at the time of writing.
Meanwhile, the licensing and litigation approaches to AI content are diverging. News Corp signed a deal with Meta worth up to $50 million per year in March 2026. UK publisher Reach agreed a usage-based deal with Amazon for its Nova AI model the same month. The Anthropic copyright case (Bartz v. Anthropic), involving the use of pirated books for AI training, reached a $1.5 billion class action settlement in 2025 — the largest in the AI copyright litigation wave so far.
Whether Britannica’s lawsuit against OpenAI will follow the path of settlement, trial, or consolidation into the MDL depends partly on the MDL’s own trajectory. No fair use ruling is expected before summer 2026 at the earliest.