Sam Altman’s trip to New Delhi is scheduled for February 5, but the plans could change as they are yet to be finalised

Altman is expected to meet senior government officials during the India visit

Altman last visited India in June 2023 and also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the visit

Amid growing legal troubles for OpenAI in the country, the artificial intelligence (AI) giant’s chief executive Sam Altman is reportedly planning to visit India next week.

Sources told Reuters that Altman’s trip to New Delhi is scheduled for February 5, adding that he will also meet senior government officials during the India visit. However, the trip is yet to be finalised and could still change.

Altman is coming to India at a time when the AI juggernaut is facing multiple headwinds in its second-largest market by number of users, after the US. The company is facing a copyright infringement lawsuit from ANI, which alleged that OpenAI used the news agency’s data to train its chatbot, ChatGPT.

Matters took a serious turn earlier this month after it was reported that a clutch of domestic and global book publishers sued the AI giant for alleged copyright infringement. The publishers’ lawsuit claims that ChatGPT provides book summaries and extracts from unlicensed copies and has sought the deletion of their data from the chatbot’s memory.

In response, OpenAI urged the Delhi High Court (HC) to quash the plea, arguing its ChatGPT service only disseminates public information.

As if this was enough, a dozen media houses, including those owned by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, have also sought inclusion in the ANI copyright infringement case.

The flurry of legal cases threaten OpenAI’s operations in its second largest market, even though the company is yet to establish a permanent office in the country. Altman’s India visit could potentially be a part of the company’s strategy to find a solution to allay the growing copyright breach concerns.

If it materialises, this will be Altman’s second trip to India in the past two years. The OpenAI chief last visited India in June 2023 during a multi-leg tour to nations such as Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE and South Korea. At the time, he also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and discussed the potential of AI in boosting India’s tech ecosystem.

During his visit in 2023, he stirred controversy after saying that it was “totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models”. Altman was responding to a question about whether a “small, smart team with a budget of $10 Mn could build something substantial within AI”.

Nearly two years later, a Chinese company DeepSeek, with less than $6 Mn in funding, appears to have emerged from the shadows as a major competition to OpenAI.