The Trump administration has stepped into OpenAI's copyright battle with The New York Times, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted material can generally qualify as fair use.
In a brief filed in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, the US government said it has a strong interest in rejecting arguments that AI training using copyrighted texts violates copyright law. It cited concerns including scientific progress and national security, according to a report by Reuters.
According to Reuters, the filing marks the first known intervention by the US government in the growing number of copyright cases surrounding AI training.
The move could strengthen the position of companies such as OpenAI as they face claims from copyright owners.
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The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023. It accused the companies of using millions of its articles without permission to train AI systems behind ChatGPT.
The case is part of a much wider legal fight. Authors, publishers, music companies and news organisations have filed similar claims against AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms.
At the centre of these cases is a key question: whether using copyrighted material to train AI models can be treated as fair use when the technology creates new and transformative outputs.
The US government has sided with the technology companies on this point. Its brief described AI training as “extraordinarily” transformative.
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The government also argued that restricting AI development based on a narrow interpretation of fair use could hurt scientific research, innovation, and economic growth.
The legal battle could have wider implications for the AI industry, as courts continue to determine how existing copyright rules apply to the development of large language models.
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