Do-it-yourself website WikiHow ​sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court for allegedly misusing its instructional ‌material to train its popular chatbot ChatGPT.The ​lawsuit is part of a wave of cases brought by publishers, ​authors and other copyright holders against AI companies over the alleged ⁠misuse of their material to train chatbots like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama ​and Google’s Gemini.

An OpenAI spokesperson said on Monday that the company’s AI models ​are “trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.” Spokespeople and attorneys for wikiHow did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new lawsuit on Monday.

WikiHow publishes ​instructional articles on “subjects ranging from routine tasks to specialized skills,” the company said ​in its complaint. The lawsuit said that OpenAI scraped more than 11,000 of its articles without ‌permission ⁠to train its GPT large language models.

WikiHow also said that ChatGPT reproduces its text in response to user prompts and threatens to displace its market.

“Having ingested wikiHow’s articles, those models now produce competing how-to content on the same subjects, at ​a fraction of ​the time, effort, ⁠and cost of researching, writing, and editing a wikiHow article,” the lawsuit said. “The substitution cuts wikiHow’s revenue and, over time, ​its reason to keep producing the articles at all.”

The ​lawsuit alleges ⁠OpenAI copied WikiHow’s work “at scale” and infringed at least 1,200 of WikiHow’s registered copyrights. WikiHow requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking OpenAI from infringing its copyrights.

The ⁠case ​is WikiHow Inc v. OpenAI Inc, U.S. District ​Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:26-cv-07171.

For WikiHow: Rohit Nath and Alejandra Salinas ​of Susman Godfrey

For OpenAI: attorney information not yet available