Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI Over ~100,000 Training Articles

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Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster jointly filed copyright suit against OpenAI on March 16, alleging it ingested nearly 100,000 of their articles to train ChatGPT without authorization. The case targets both memorization of specific content and direct reproduction in model outputs — a dual-vector copyright test that could establish binding precedent for all encyclopedic and reference publishers. Most authoritative reference-publisher consortium to sue an AI lab to date.