The Trump administration submitted a brief to Manhattan federal court on Tuesday supporting OpenAI in an ongoing lawsuit filed by the New York Times. The Times alleges that OpenAI and its backer Microsoft used millions of newspaper articles without authorization to train the company’s chatbot system. Additional news organizations have joined the legal action, which was originally filed in 2023.
While the government’s brief carries advisory rather than binding legal weight, it may provide support to tech companies defending against copyright claims. Administration officials emphasized that artificial intelligence development is essential to American competitiveness and national security. US Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. stated that the administration would not allow the nation to fall behind foreign adversaries based on what he characterized as an incorrect interpretation of copyright law.
The central legal question in this and related cases involves whether AI training qualifies as fair use under copyright doctrine. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick addressed the topic at a G20 meeting, suggesting that countries should permit AI companies to use creators’ work for training purposes while developing mechanisms to compensate artists.
Multiple copyright holders, including authors, publishers, music labels, and news organizations, have initiated dozens of lawsuits against major technology companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Platforms. These suits contend that the companies misappropriate protected material to develop AI systems without providing compensation. Machine learning systems used to power AI chatbots require training on vast quantities of text data, which the systems then use to generate responses through statistical analysis.
Two judges who previously considered fair use questions in similar cases issued conflicting rulings last year, indicating that this legal issue remains unsettled. The government’s brief argued that large language models represent extraordinarily transformative uses of source material and that limiting their development would impede scientific progress and American economic prosperity.
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