Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly ‘memorizing’ its content with ChatGPT
infonewsLLM-Specific
securitypolicy
Source: The Verge (AI)March 16, 2026
Summary
Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued OpenAI, claiming it used their copyrighted content to train ChatGPT without permission and that GPT-4 (OpenAI's AI model) now outputs text that closely matches their original material. The publishers allege that OpenAI 'memorized' their content during training, meaning the AI absorbed and can reproduce substantial portions of their work.
Classification
Attack SophisticationModerate
Impact (CIA+S)
confidentialityintegrity
AI Component TargetedTraining Data
Affected Vendors
OpenAI
Related Issues
Original source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/895372/encyclopedia-britannica-openai-lawsuit
First tracked: March 16, 2026 at 02:00 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 95%