# WikiHow sues OpenAI for scraping over 11,000 articles without permission > Source: > Published: 2026-08-25 04:06:34+00:00 Via gizmodo.com # WikiHow sues OpenAI for scraping over 11,000 articles without permission The how-to site's lawsuit, the 24th filed against OpenAI in the US, claims infringement of at least 1,200 registered copyrights WikiHow has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming the AI company scraped more than 11,000 of its instructional articles to train GPT models, including ChatGPT, without ever asking permission. The complaint, filed August 21, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, lands OpenAI in familiar territory: it is now the defendant in at least 24 copyright cases brought in US courts. The suit does not name a specific damages figure, but it seeks both monetary compensation and injunctive relief, which could include a court order forcing OpenAI to stop using the scraped content in future training runs. ## What WikiHow is actually claiming The core argument is straightforward. WikiHow says its team spent years producing detailed, illustrated how-to guides, and OpenAI used more than 11,000 of those articles as raw training material without a license, a payment, or even a heads-up. The complaint asserts that at least 1,200 of those articles carry registered copyrights, which matters because registered works unlock statutory damages in US court, a much sharper financial weapon than actual damages alone. WikiHow’s second argument is economic. ChatGPT, the complaint contends, now produces step-by-step instructional content that competes directly with WikiHow’s articles, doing so faster and at a fraction of the production cost. OpenAI’s response follows the playbook it has used in virtually every similar case. The company maintains that its models are trained on publicly available data and that such use falls within the fair use doctrine, the legal principle that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission under certain conditions. ## Lawsuit number 24 in a very long line WikiHow’s filing is the 24th copyright suit brought against OpenAI in the United States. The company is simultaneously defending claims from news publishers, book authors, visual artists, and now a wiki-style instructional platform. Each case probes a slightly different corner of the same central question: does training an AI model on copyrighted text constitute infringement? WikiHow’s position in this landscape is interesting because the site occupies a middle ground between a major media outlet and an individual creator. It is not the New York Times, which filed its own high-profile suit against OpenAI, but it is also not a solo author fighting a corporation with vastly superior legal resources. WikiHow’s content library is large, standardized in format, and heavily indexed by search engines, which made it a useful training source and also makes the alleged infringement relatively easy to document. The instructional content vertical is also particularly exposed to AI disruption. When someone asks ChatGPT how to unclog a drain or tie a bowline knot, the model produces a clean numbered list in seconds. The lawsuit is, in part, a financial survival argument: if AI models trained on WikiHow content can replicate WikiHow’s output on demand, the original site loses both traffic and advertising revenue, which in turn reduces the incentive to keep producing the original content the models were trained on in the first place. ## What the outcome could mean for AI and content There is also a narrower but real question about injunctive relief. WikiHow is asking the court to do more than award damages; it wants a judge to order OpenAI to stop using the scraped material. If granted, that kind of relief could require OpenAI to retrain affected models. The case sits in the Southern District of New York, the same court handling several other high-profile AI copyright suits. How those judges interpret the fair use doctrine in the context of large language model training, specifically the commercial nature of the use and the effect on the original market, will be worth watching closely as the docket develops. **Disclosure:** This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our [Editorial Policy](https://cryptobriefing.com/editorial-policy/).