In July 2024, ANI (India's largest multimedia news agency) wrote to OpenAI asking it to stop using their content to train ChatGPT. OpenAI continued. By October 2024, ANI's domain had been added to an opt-out list, but by then the dispute had already moved upstream through ANI's organisation: from the content teams who noticed the unauthorised reproduction, to the commercial leadership evaluating the licensing revenue being bypassed, to the board deciding whether to litigate. The lawyers arrived last. The Delhi High Court suit was filed in November 2024, months after the commercial decision to pursue it had already been taken.
ANI v OpenAI is instructive, not primarily as a copyright case, though it is that, and a significant one, but as a case study in how disputes form. The legal filing was the final chapter of a process that began in an operational team noticing something wrong, travelled through a commercial conversation about value and loss, and only crystallised into a legal mandate once the internal decision-making had run its course.
This sequence is not unique to AI licensing. It is the standard architecture of most cross-border commercial disputes. And for lawyers who want to be involved early and not just when the notice of arbitration lands, understanding that sequence is more useful than almost anything else.
The first signal in a technology or digital infrastructure dispute almost always surfaces operationally. A platform integration underperforms against contractual benchmarks. An AI vendor alters its pricing model mid-contract. A licensing arrangement starts generating outputs, or revenue, that one party did not anticipate and did not agree to. At this stage, the key people are Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), digital infrastructure heads, content licensing teams, and platform integration managers. Their question is practical: is this working the way it was supposed to?
Their instinct, almost universally, is to fix it commercially rather than escalate legally. Renegotiation feels cheaper, faster, and less damaging to the relationship. This is also the stage at which external advisers with sector credibility (not lawyers yet) begin entering the picture. These are people who can explain how similar situations have played out elsewhere.
The issue becomes legally relevant when operational friction starts affecting revenue, investment value, or strategic positioning. In the ANI case, the moment OpenAI allegedly began generating fabricated news stories attributed to ANI, the dispute shifted from a licensing disagreement to a reputational and commercial crisis. At that point, the conversation moved to the CFO, the board, and eventually the lawyers. But the underlying dynamic - unauthorised commercial use of proprietary content, had been in motion for months before anyone reached for a litigation strategy.
By the time dispute resolution counsel becomes involved, the facts are largely set. The contractual interpretation questions, the jurisdictional challenges, the damages framework - these are downstream of decisions that have already been made by people who are not lawyers.
The implication for cross-border practice development is straightforward but underutilised. If the first people worrying about a future dispute are investment partners, technology heads, content licensing teams, and infrastructure financiers and not legal departments, then the relationships that produce mandates need to exist upstream of the General Counsel (GC) layer.
This is not an argument against GC relationships. It is an argument for building earlier. The investment director at a Singapore fund with India digital infrastructure exposure is not thinking about arbitration clauses. She is thinking about whether her portfolio company's AI licensing arrangement is structured to withstand a regulatory shift, or whether a content deal is priced in a way that will hold when the platform's market position changes. Those are commercial questions, not legal ones. But they are the exact questions that, if unresolved, eventually produce the mandates.
Several current signals are worth watching in this context. The ANI v OpenAI case has drawn interventions from T-Series, Saregama, Sony, and the Federation of Indian Publishers, which means the content licensing terms between Indian rights holders and global AI platforms are now being litigated on multiple fronts simultaneously. The commercial teams at those companies are already in active conversation about how to restructure their arrangements. The legal work that follows will go to firms already trusted within those conversations.
Similarly, India's telecom sector is navigating a significant transition: new licensing frameworks under the Telecommunications Act 2023, AI-driven network infrastructure tied to 5G rollout, and ongoing friction between operators over infrastructure sharing and right-of-way obligations. The operational teams managing those relationships are the first to know when something is going wrong.
The question for any firm thinking seriously about cross-border digital and technology disputes is therefore not only which legal issues are likely to arise - though that matters - but who is worrying about the precursor commercial problems right now, and whether the firm is already in the room when those conversations happen.
Disputes do not announce themselves in advance. But they do leave early traces in renegotiation requests that go unanswered, contractual provisions that one party has quietly stopped observing, and commercial relationships where the original business logic has shifted but the documentation has not caught up.
By the time legal teams become fully involved, those traces have usually hardened into positions. The firms that shape mandates, rather than merely receive them, tend to be the ones that read those traces early.
About the author: Prachi Shrivastava is a lawyer, former business journalist, and founder of Lawfinity Solutions, where she advises law firms, General Counsel and international arbitration practices on positioning and practice development. She works at the intersection of legal market intelligence and cross-border dispute strategy.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s). The opinions presented do not necessarily reflect the views of Bar & Bench.
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