WikiHow, the internet's sprawling repository of step-by-step guides on everything from folding a fitted sheet to jump-starting a car, has taken OpenAI to court.
According to IPWatchdog.com, wikiHow's parent company, How, Inc., has filed a complaint against OpenAI, Inc. alleging violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. IPWatchdog published its report on August 25, 2026, and the coverage was picked up through both Google News and Bing News aggregators.
The two legal claims are worth separating. A Copyright Act claim is the familiar one: the accusation that protected work was copied without permission. The DMCA claim is more technical and often overlooked — that provision covers, among other things, the removal or alteration of copyright management information, the digital labeling that identifies who owns a piece of content and under what terms it can be used.
Beyond those details, the sources available here do not specify what damages wikiHow is seeking, which court is hearing the case, or how OpenAI has responded. OpenAI has not commented in the material reported above.
The underlying tension is easy to grasp even without the legal filings. WikiHow's business is built on people arriving at its pages with a practical question and reading the answer there. A chatbot that can deliver the same instructions conversationally, without sending anyone to the original site, threatens that model at its foundation — regardless of how the copyright question is ultimately resolved.
This matters because wikiHow joins a growing line of publishers testing whether the law requires AI companies to pay for the human-written content their systems were trained on, and the answers courts reach will shape who gets compensated when a machine repeats what someone else wrote.