Trump Administration Backs OpenAI Against New York Times

The Trump administration has intervened on OpenAI's side in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit, telling the court that training AI models on copyrighted work is fair use.

The government filed a statement of interest in the case this week, according to The Verge and The Hill. A statement of interest is a filing by the United States in private litigation setting out the government's position; it does not make the government a party.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging OpenAI unlawfully trained its systems on Times articles, and is seeking billions of dollars in damages.

What the Filing Says

"The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI's large language models (LLMs)," U.S. attorneys wrote, according to The Verge. "That result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper 'the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'"

The filing argues that "LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs" and that "constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility."

It also leaves room on the specifics: "The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case," the attorneys wrote. "But it would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing."