Trump administration backs OpenAI in copyright fight with The New York Times

The Trump administration has filed a brief backing OpenAI’s argument that training AI chatbots on copyrighted material without permission is legal under fair use, a copyright rule that allows some unauthorized use. The 20-page filing landed in The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI, pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The brief argues that restricting how companies train large language models, AI systems that generate text by predicting words, would slow American progress in artificial intelligence. It cites an executive order President Trump signed last year calling for the country to “retain global leadership in artificial intelligence.” The filing states that the United States has “a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally.”

The government also argues that misreading fair use doctrine would carry economic costs. “Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility,” the brief says.

A pattern of rulings favoring AI companies

The central legal question is whether feeding copyrighted books and articles into AI training databases counts as transformative enough to qualify as fair use, rather than infringement. The Times argues it does not. OpenAI and the Trump administration argue it does.

Courts have largely sided with AI companies so far. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to settle a case brought by writers, but the penalty was for using pirated copies of their books through illegal shadow libraries, not for training its models on copyrighted text. Alsup wrote that Anthropic’s systems trained on the works “not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” comparing the process to a person reading before writing.

The Trump administration’s brief has no binding authority. Its authors have no jurisdiction over the New York court weighing the Times’ case, and the filing does not decide the outcome. But it shows the federal government now arguing publicly against publishers on the copyright question shaping the AI industry, alongside the companies it regulates.

The case remains active in the Southern District of New York, where a judge will eventually rule on whether OpenAI’s use of the Times’ journalism was fair use or infringement. That decision, and others working through similar lawsuits against AI companies, will determine whether publishers can demand licensing payments or block AI training on their work.