A judgment has settled the debate on whether AI training should pay for news content in India, with a clear outcome. On July 24 local time, the Delhi High Court ruled that OpenAI's use of content from Asian News International (ANI) to train its artificial intelligence model does not constitute copyright infringement.

Judge Amit Bansal outlined two core reasons in the judgment. First, OpenAI's actions fall within the "fair use" exception defined by India's Copyright Act. Second, ANI has never provided evidence to the court proving direct copying of ANI's copyrighted content in ChatGPT's responses. These two rulings directly undermined the foundation of ANI's lawsuit.

More importantly, the judgment explicitly rejected an injunction. The judge emphasized that issuing a temporary injunction at this stage would not help the development of artificial intelligence, but instead would severely hinder India's emerging large language model projects. Once implemented, the injunction would also have widespread negative ripple effects on the public interest—users who freely use ChatGPT in India would feel the chill first. In other words, the court placed "protecting one content provider" against "hurting the entire industry and the public," ultimately betting on the latter.

This is not an isolated case. Previously, media outlets such as The New York Times have filed similar lawsuits against OpenAI in the United States, and the case is still under review. As similar disputes proceed independently in different jurisdictions, India's ruling has at least opened a gap in the accusation that "training equals infringement."