Encyclopaedia Britannica is the latest giant to sue OpenAI

Encyclopaedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly misusing its reference materials to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The Chicago-based Britannica Group runs Britannica.com and Merriam-Webster.com, the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Creator of the 250-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica, the company ended its print edition in 2012, survived Wikipedia, and has since focused on educational software and digital growth, including selling artificial intelligence agent software, according to The New York Times.

Back in 2000, Britannica acquired Melingo AI, which offers “AI-powered solutions and natural–language processing” in multiple languages by leveraging artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, according to Britannica’s website.

The Britannica Group alleges OpenAI—which is backed by Microsoft—used information from its encyclopedia and dictionary to train its AI chatbot ChatGPT. The problem is, OpenAI now automatically generates AI summaries of that content on its own platform, which is resulting in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s and Merriam-Webster’s own web traffic plummeting.

The lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan court on Friday.

“Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company in an email statement. “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives.”

Fast Company has also reached out to the Britannica Group for comment.

Since 2013, the Britannica Group, also known as Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., has not only survived, but thrived. In 2024, it took the first steps to go public, filing a draft registration statement for an initial public offering at a valuation of around $1 billion, The New York Times and Yahoo Finance reported.