The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in a lawsuit against the New York Times, arguing in favor of the use of copyrighted writing to train artificial intelligence.
The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023.
In a brief filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, the US government weighed in for the first time on lawsuits over the tense battle over AI and copyright. A brief has advisory rather than legal weight but could bolster tech companies as they fight the claims.
“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 … As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence’,” the brief said.
Copyright owners, including authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets, have filed dozens of lawsuits over AI training against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms. They say the companies misuse their material to train AI systems and do so without compensation.
For AI chatbots to generate responses, machine learning systems are first fed billions of lines of text. The bots produce their output by statistical analysis of what the next word should be by matching a user’s query to parts of the database.
Spokespeople for the Times and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing on Wednesday.
“AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans,” US associate attorney general Stanley Woodward Jr said in a statement posted to X. “This Administration will never let our Nation be at a disadvantage relative to our foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law.”
The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, separately told G20 officials at a meeting in North Carolina on Wednesday that their countries should embrace fair use and allow AI companies to train their models on creators’ work while finding a way to “protect artists”.
All of the pending cases will probably revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the question issued diverging rulings last year.
The government agreed with tech companies in Tuesday’s brief that AI training is “extraordinarily” transformative.
“Beyond the subject matter of this litigation, LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs,” the brief said. “Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”
