Trump Administration Backs OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Case

The Trump administration has filed a legal brief supporting OpenAI in its copyright dispute with The New York Times, arguing that training artificial intelligence models on copyrighted material generally constitutes fair use under U.S. law. The filing, submitted in a Manhattan federal court on September 1, marks the first time the federal government has formally intervened in the growing wave of copyright lawsuits targeting AI companies. In the brief, the Department of Justice stated that the United States has a strong interest in the court rejecting arguments that training large language models on copyrighted texts violates copyright law. The government framed the issue as critical to national security and economic competitiveness, asserting that AI dominance is essential for American prosperity and that overly restrictive copyright interpretations could disadvantage the nation relative to foreign adversaries. The administration characterized the process of training AI models on written works as "extraordinarily transformative," arguing that the models do not simply reproduce the material but use it to develop systems capable of new tasks.