Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI a major US tech company in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has planned to visit India next week in February to address the legal issues his company is facing in the country.
Sam’s trip has been arranged after the firm came to the public’s attention as major Indian news publishers, including HT Digital Streams, Indian Express Digital, Network18 and NDTV, Dainik Bhaskar, Zee News, India Today Group, and The Hindu have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in New Delhi court.
The lawsuit filed by Indian news firms entails claims that the original news and information content (text, audio, visual) prepared by journalists are being used by OpenAI to train their AI models without due permission or any compensation thereby infringing upon copyright laws of India. OpenAI is facing similar lawsuits filed by media organizations including The New York Times in US.
As reported by the Hindustan Times, it is expected that Sam Altman’s visit to New Delhi on 5th February is to have discussions with government officials for further solutions and settlement for these claims. This trip will be the second visit of Sam Altman to India as previously he visited in 2023 wherein he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi to discuss the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in building India’s tech ecosystem.
This visit and discussion are important for OpenAI as it has said previously that India is its second-largest market in terms of the number of users after the US. Not only Indian news agencies and publishers even in the US, many major news outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Orange County Register, and others have also claimed OpenAI for copyright violations.
OpenAI has recently indicated the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek for stealing its ChatGPT data to train its latest R1 AI model. However, OpenAI has said that it only uses publicly available information and data in a lawful and protected way. With multiple lawsuits and allegations that have been filed against the firm worldwide, OpenAI finds itself at a necessary turning point.
