ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules

Tue, 11 Nov 2025

OpenAI ordered to pay undisclosed damages for training its language models on artists’ work without permission

A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.

The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.