The Trump Administration backs OpenAI in its copyright lawsuit with the NYT

The Trump Administration has taken sides for the first time in the wave of copyright litigation facing the artificial intelligence industry, filing a brief with a federal court in Manhattan in support of OpenAI in its dispute with The New York Times. The Justice Department argued, in a 20-page brief, that training large language models on copyrighted material generally constitutes fair use. According to Reuters, this is the first time the U.S. government has intervened in this type of litigation, brought by authors, publishers, record labels and media outlets over the use of their works to train AI systems.

Although this type of brief carries no binding legal authority, it can strengthen the position of the tech companies defending themselves against these lawsuits in court. The government's filing contends that "the United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates intellectual property law," citing concerns related to scientific advancement and national security. The government called AI training "extraordinarily" transformative.

U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward defended the filing in a statement posted on X, saying that "dominance in AI is fundamental to advancing national security, prosperity and economic mobility for all Americans" and that "this Administration will never allow our nation to be placed at a disadvantage against our foreign adversaries because of a plainly incorrect reading of copyright law."

In parallel, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick addressed G20 officials gathered in North Carolina, urging nations to adopt fair use principles that allow AI companies to use creators' work to train their models, while seeking ways to "protect artists."

The NYT sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that both companies used millions of its articles without authorization to build ChatGPT. The case has expanded since then, with other news organizations joining related legal actions. This litigation is part of a broader set of lawsuits in which copyright holders have sued OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms over the use of their works to train AI systems. The outcome of each pending case will depend on whether AI systems' use of protected material to produce new, transformative content qualifies as fair use. The first two court decisions on this question, issued last year, contradicted each other.

The NYT case has become contentious well beyond the copyright questions that gave rise to it. The newspaper and 16 other media organizations sought sanctions against OpenAI this year, alleging that the company withheld and destroyed evidence, including making billions of ChatGPT exchanges inaccessible and misrepresenting its ability to search for protected material in its systems. OpenAI has denied these accusations. According to regulatory filings, the NYT has spent more than $28 million on AI-related litigation.