I expected the Delhi High Court’s ruling on ANI versus OpenAI to go the other way. News agencies have made real headway in other jurisdictions arguing that training on their reporting is itself the infringement, and I assumed an Indian court would lean toward the plaintiff on a fact pattern this sympathetic. It didn’t, and the reasoning it used is the more interesting story than the outcome. The Delhi High Court ruled that OpenAI’s use of ANI content to train ChatGPT wasn’t copyright infringement, because ANI didn’t show that ChatGPT actually reproduced its reports.

I think Big Tech gets away with treating “user safety” as a compliance checkbox more often than it should, and I’ve said so in this space before. If a $1 billion fine landed on Google for something a European regulator plausibly called a child-safety failure, my first instinct is to side with the regulator. My first instinct is wrong here, and not for the reason Google’s lobbyists would give you.