News-WikiHow-Sues-OpenAI-Copyright-2026
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August 21, 2026 — wikiHow filed a copyright and Digital Millennium Copyright Act lawsuit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York, alleging that OpenAI copied thousands of wikiHow articles for model training, retrieval-augmented generation, and ChatGPT outputs without permission or payment.[1][2]
Allegations
The complaint alleges that OpenAI copied wikiHow articles at scale to train large language models, separately retrieved and copied the articles through retrieval-augmented generation systems, and produced outputs that reproduce protected expression.[1] It also alleges that OpenAI removed copyright-management information in violation of the DMCA.[1]
wikiHow says 1,211 copyright registrations cover the 11,211 articles at issue.[1] The complaint alleges that OpenAI's published IP addresses accessed wikiHow more than 185,000 times between March 27 and May 16, 2025, and that OpenAI and Common Crawl activity exceeded 300,000 visits since May 2025.[1][2]
Relief sought
wikiHow seeks injunctive relief, damages, OpenAI's profits attributable to the alleged infringement, and removal of the asserted works from OpenAI systems and datasets.[1]
See case page: wikiHow Inc. v. OpenAI Inc.