22OCT

OpenAI signs Times of India and Express

3 min read

16:20UTC

Bennett, Coleman and Co and the Indian Express Group signed with OpenAI within two days, OpenAI's first disclosed publisher deals in India; no terms are public.

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Key takeaway

OpenAI's first Indian publisher deals include a group that had backed the ANI suit against it.

Bennett, Coleman and Co, publisher of The Times of India and The Economic Times, announced a partnership with OpenAI on 7 September. Summaries and excerpts from its titles will appear in ChatGPT answers with attribution and links⁠¹. Those links are the publisher's route back to readers; the Reuters Institute found in June that 42% of surveyed chatbot news users said they always or often clicked through to original sources.

The Indian Express Group followed on 8 and 9 September, covering The Indian Express, The Financial Express and its business titles, live and archived, in English and six Indian languages from Hindi to Gujarati⁠². These are OpenAI's first publicly disclosed publisher deals in India. Neither group nor OpenAI has published terms.

The Indian Express joined the copyright suit that ANI (Asian News International), a leading Indian news agency, brought against OpenAI in the Delhi High Court in January 2025. On 24 July 2026 that court refused ANI an interim injunction (an order to stop OpenAI using its content while the case runs), and ANI has appealed. The Express signed six weeks later. No party has linked the two; the connection is our reading of the dates, in which a publisher that backed the suit signed once the court declined to act.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

OpenAI makes ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that answers questions in plain language. Many news publishers want to be paid when their articles help ChatGPT answer. Two of India's biggest newspaper companies have now signed deals. Bennett, Coleman and Co publishes The Times of India and The Economic Times. The Indian Express Group publishes The Indian Express and The Financial Express. ChatGPT will show short summaries and quotes from their articles, with links back. The Indian Express had earlier joined a court case against OpenAI brought by ANI, an Indian news agency. In July a Delhi court refused ANI's request to stop OpenAI using its content while the case continues.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The Delhi High Court's refusal of interim relief on 24 July removed the prospect of a quick court order stopping OpenAI from using Indian news while the case runs. A publisher in the suit then had to weigh years of litigation against a licence on offer now. The timing fits that reading; no party has stated it.

OpenAI's offer is also built for retrieval: attributed excerpts with links, which send readers back to the publishers' sites. That lets a publisher license current answers without conceding anything about past training.

What could happen next?

Consequence
ANI's appeal now proceeds with one of its supporting publishers holding a licence from the defendant.
Opportunity
Other Indian groups have a template for display licensing in multiple languages, and exchange4media reports two more deals in progress.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Canada shows the same split this autumn. Village Media signed with OpenAI in mid-September for citations, funding and model credits, while Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press kept suing OpenAI and opened a claim against Anthropic.

Counter-parallel: In Argentina, Editorial Perfil sued OpenAI and Microsoft after a mediation that, its lawyer says, produced no serious offer. There the publisher went from talks to court; in India, a publisher went from court to a deal.

No party has published terms. exchange4media reported unconfirmed values of about $5m a year for Bennett, Coleman and Co and about $3m a year for The Indian Express Group, and later reported two more Indian deals in the works.

The Indian Express package spans English and six Indian languages, live and archived, so any per-year figure buys OpenAI a multilingual back catalogue as well as current news.

Consensus view: The two groups' own announcements describe a display licence, not a training licence: summaries and excerpts surface in ChatGPT answers with attribution and links. The Indian Express Group's deal covers live and archived content in English, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali and Gujarati.

Counter-view: ANI has not settled. It appealed the Delhi High Court's 24 July refusal of an interim injunction and is still pressing a copyright claim over the same kind of use that its former co-litigant now licenses.

Key tension: Whether the Indian Express stays in ANI's case while licensing its archive to the defendant. Neither the group nor ANI has said.

First Reported In

Update #13 · USA Today sues OpenAI but not Microsoft

medianews4u· 22 Oct 2026

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Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.