By Arpan Chaturvedi, Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – OpenAI told an Indian court that any order to delete training data powering its ChatGPT service would be inconsistent with its legal obligations in the United States, according to a recent filing seen by Reuters.
The Microsoft-backed AI company also said it was outside the jurisdiction of Indian courts to hear a copyright infringement case brought by local news agency ANI as OpenAI was not not present in the country.
In the most high-profile and widely-watched lawsuit over the use of AI in India, ANI sued OpenAI in Delhi in November, accusing it of using content published by the news agency without authorization to train ChatGPT.
OpenAI responded to the lawsuit, which also seeks the deletion of ANI data already stored by ChatGPT, in an 86-page filing with the Delhi High Court dated January 10, which has not been previously reported.
OpenAI and other companies have faced a wave of similar lawsuits from prominent copyright owners over alleged misuse of their work to train AI models, including a case brought by the New York Times (NYSE:) against OpenAI in the United States.
OpenAI has repeatedly denied these allegations, saying its AI systems make fair use of publicly available data.
At a hearing in November, OpenAI told the 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 its January 10 submission, OpenAI said it was currently defending litigation in the United States over the data its models were trained on, with laws requiring it to retain the data during hearings.
OpenAI “is therefore subject to a legal obligation under the laws of the United States to retain, and not delete, such training data,” it says.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
In its submission, OpenAI also said that the reliefs sought by ANI were not subject to the procedures of Indian courts and were beyond their jurisdiction.
The company has “no office or permanent establishment in India…the servers on which (ChatGPT) stores its training data are also located outside India.”
ANI, in which Reuters has a 26% stake, said in a statement that it believed the Delhi court had jurisdiction to hear the case and would file a detailed response.
A Reuters spokesperson 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.
The New Delhi court 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 secure even more funding to stay ahead in the costly AI race after raising $6.6 billion last year.
In recent months, it has signed deals with Time magazine, the Financial Times, Axel Springer, owner of Business Insider, the French newspaper Le Monde and the Spanish newspaper. Hurry up (BME:) Media to display content.
ANI also expressed concerns about unfair competition given OpenAI’s commercial partnerships with other news organizations, and told the court that in response to user requests, ChatGPT reproduced verbatim or substantially similar excerpts from the work of ANI.
In its rebuttal, OpenAI claims that ANI “sought to use textual excerpts from its own article as a prompt, in an attempt to manipulate ChatGPT.”