US Government Supports OpenAI in Copyright Dispute with New York Times

The United States Department of Justice has filed a brief in a federal court in New York supporting OpenAI in its ongoing copyright lawsuit with The New York Times. The government argues that training large language models on copyrighted material should be considered fair use because the process is transformative. According to the filing, the training process uses copyrighted text to learn language patterns and make predictions rather than making the original works available to the public. The government warns that requiring AI companies to license all training material could hinder innovation, hurt competition, and threaten US national security by giving an advantage to foreign adversaries. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that millions of its articles were used without permission to train AI models. A spokesperson for the newspaper stated that the government is aligning itself with trillion dollar companies at the expense of human creators. The Department of Justice distinguished between the training process and the outputs of the AI, noting that the fair use argument applies to the training phase and not necessarily to instances where a model reproduces entire passages of protected work. This position follows a January 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at sustaining American global dominance in artificial intelligence.