Exclusive-OpenAI tells Indian court that removing ChatGPT data will violate US legal obligations Reuters

By Arpan Chaturvedi, Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – OpenAI has told an Indian court that any order to remove the training data that powers its ChatGPT service would run afoul of its legal obligations in the United States, according to a recent filing seen by Reuters.

The Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence company also said it was not within the jurisdiction of Indian courts to hear a copyright infringement case filed by local news agency ANI because OpenAI has no presence in the country.

In the most high-profile and closely watched lawsuit over the use of artificial intelligence in India, ANI sued OpenAI in Delhi in November, accusing it of using the news agency’s published content without permission to train ChatGPT.

OpenAI responded to the suit, which also seeks deletion of ANI’s data already stored by ChatGPT, in an 86-page filing in the Delhi High Court on January 10, which was not previously reported.

OpenAI and other companies have faced a wave of similar lawsuits from prominent copyright holders for allegedly misusing their work to train AI models, including a case brought by The New York Times (NYSE: ) v. OpenAI in the United States.

OpenAI has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying its AI systems make fair use of publicly available data.

During a hearing in November, OpenAI told a Delhi court that it would no longer use ANI’s content, but the news agency argued that its published works were stored in ChatGPT’s memory and should be deleted.

In a Jan. 10 filing, OpenAI said it is currently defending litigation in the United States involving the data on which its models were trained, with laws there requiring the data to be preserved while hearings are ongoing.

OpenAI is therefore “under a legal obligation under United States law to preserve, and not delete, said training data,” it said.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

In its submission, OpenAI also said that the relief sought by ANI is not subject to the processes of Indian courts and is beyond their jurisdiction.

The company has “no office or permanent establishment in India…the servers on which it (ChatGPT) stores its training data are similarly located outside India”.

ANI, in which Reuters has a 26% stake, said in a statement that it believed the Delhi court had jurisdiction to decide the matter and would file a detailed response.

A Reuters spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the agency said in November that it was not involved in ANI’s business practices or operations.

A court in New Delhi is scheduled to hear the case on January 28.

OpenAI is preparing to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company as it seeks to raise even more funding to stay ahead of the expensive artificial intelligence race after raising $6.6 billion last year.

In recent months, he has signed contracts with Time magazine, the Financial Times, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa (BME:) Content display media.

ANI also said it was concerned about unfair competition given OpenAI’s commercial partnerships with other news organizations and told the court that in response to user queries, ChatGPT reproduced verbatim or substantially similar excerpts of ANI’s work.

In its rebuttal filing, OpenAI claims that ANI “sought to use verbatim excerpts of its own article as a prompt, in an attempt to manipulate ChatGPT.”