Monday, March 23, 2026

Merriam-Webster sues OpenAI

News from TechCrunch :

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging in its complaint that the AI giant has committed “massive copyright infringement.”

Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI’s LLMs without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit.
Here’s the complaint. The examples of copying including in the complaint are — no surprise — damning.

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[And only this morning I was writing about Merriam-Webster losing traffic to Google AI.]

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