OpenAI’s Legal Woes Driven by Unclear Mesh of Web-Scraping Laws

OpenAI Inc. faces a barrage of lawsuits that will test the legality of web-scraping practices used by the artificial intelligence industry to soak up enormous volumes of data across the internet to train popular programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E.

A wide-ranging class action filed last week against OpenAI and investor Microsoft Corp. claimed the company scraped the personal data of hundreds of millions of internet users in violation of a swath of privacy, intellectual property, and anti-hacking laws.

But the legality of using bots to grab information from public websites isn’t entirely clear. Many of the applicable ...