Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI Over AI Training

Encyclopedia Britannica is coming for OpenAI — and it brought the dictionary.

Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Manhattan federal court. The allegation: OpenAI misused their reference materials to train its AI models without permission.

It's the latest in a growing pile of copyright lawsuits targeting the AI giant. This time, two of the most iconic reference brands in the English language are on the offensive. Britannica's centuries-old encyclopedia and Merriam-Webster's dictionary represent massive troves of curated, authoritative content — exactly the kind of high-quality data AI companies crave for training.

OpenAI hasn't publicly responded to the suit yet. But the case adds more legal pressure to the fundamental question haunting generative AI: who gets paid when machines learn from human work?