OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is planning to visit India next week at a time when his company is facing legal challenges in the country, news agency Reuters reported, quoting three unnamed sources.
HT couldn’t independently verify the information.
Altman has scheduled his trip to New Delhi for February 5, 2025, according to the report. A meeting with government officials may also take place.
However, this schedule is not yet finalised and the plans may still change.
This could be Altman’s first visit to India in two years, with the previous one being when Altman met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi in 2023 to discuss the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in boosting India’s tech ecosystem.
The trip comes after a lawsuit by Indian news agency ANI came about last year which claimed breaches of copyright by OpenAI. ANI challenged the AI giant in a New Delhi court, accusing it of using its news articles to train its AI models without any compensation.
ANI is not alone in this. Book publishers and almost a dozen digital media outlets, including Hindustan Times, have also since joined the case.
This is important since OpenAI had said previously that India is its second-largest market in terms of the sheer number of users after the US, according to the report.
Even in the US, several news outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Orange County Register and others have also sued OpenAI for copyright violations.
Hoever, OpenAI has claimed that it only uses publicly available data in a way protected by fair use principles. It also argued that Indian courts have no jurisdiction to hear the matter.
OpenAI’s current troubles aren’t just restricted to lawsuits. A completely unrelated issue it is also facing at the moment comes in the form of competition from Chinese AI rival DeepSeek which overtook ChatGPT, becoming the top-rated free app on Apple’s App Store in the US. This also trigerred a global tech stock rout.
