Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI, accusing it of reproducing its content.

As generative AI becomes increasingly common, tensions with traditional publishers continue to intensify.

And after several media outlets and rights holders, it is now a historic institution of knowledge that is launching a legal offensive…

An accusation of “memorizing” content

As reported by Reuters, the publisher Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with Merriam-Webster, has filed a complaint against OpenAI with a federal court in Manhattan. The two organizations accuse the company of using their copyrighted material to train its models, including GPT-4. According to the complaint, which is publicly available, these models are capable of reproducing passages almost identical to the original texts. Britannica even mentions a direct "memorization" of its content, allowing the AI to generate responses that reproduce certain sections of its articles word for word. The examples provided in the report notably compare excerpts from ChatGPT with those from the encyclopedia, with striking similarities. The publisher thus believes that these reproductions are unauthorized copies used from the training phase onward. A direct impact on traffic and the business model: Beyond the copyright issue, Encyclopaedia Britannica denounces a more structural effect with the direct competition from AI-generated responses. Unlike traditional search engines, which redirect users to the source websites, chatbots provide complete answers without requiring a click.

For Britannica, this logic would lead to a "cannibalization" of traffic, as internet users no longer need to consult the original pages. For a company like this, whose value rests on the quality and reliability of its content, the stakes are also economic.

The company is therefore seeking damages, as well as the restitution of profits generated through these practices. In its complaint, it also asks the court to prohibit OpenAI from continuing to exploit its content in this way.

Growing legal pressure on AI

This new episode is part of a broader wave of litigation targeting artificial intelligence companies. The New York Times has already launched a similar lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of extensively using its articles. At the same time, competitors like Anthropic have had to reach financial settlements, including with authors, to resolve disputes related to the use of copyrighted books. Notably, this isn't Britannica's first confrontation, as the publisher also sued Perplexity on similar grounds. But this proliferation of lawsuits illustrates a turning point for the industry. As AI models become more powerful, the question of their data sources and the respect for associated rights is becoming a central issue for the entire digital ecosystem.