The Trump administration has officially intervened in the copyright lawsuit between The New York Times and OpenAI, siding with the AI company in one of the industry’s most critical legal disputes.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a 20-page statement of interest arguing that OpenAI’s training of large language models on copyrighted content qualifies as lawful fair use. The filing stated: “The United States has a strong interest in the continued development of a competitive AI industry and in setting the standard for global AI practices.”
The lawsuit, initiated by The New York Times in December 2023, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of unlawfully training AI systems on millions of the newspaper’s articles without authorization, seeking “billions of dollars” in damages. It is among the pioneering legal battles over AI copyright and could establish a precedent for a wave of similar lawsuits from other publishers.
The Trump administration’s arguments
The Justice Department contended that restricting fair use in AI training would “impede the progress of science and useful arts” while harming America’s “economic prosperity and mobility.” Federal attorneys cited an executive order on AI signed by President Trump last year, emphasizing the objective to “maintain global leadership in AI.”
The brief also cited a ruling by Judge William Alsup in the Anthropic case last year. Judge Alsup had likened an LLM learning from books to a human reading books to learn how to write, ruling that training on lawfully acquired materials constitutes fair use. However, Anthropic was still ordered to pay $1.5 billion for using a shadow library to acquire the books, rather than for the act of training itself.
The broader context
AI copyright disputes are intensifying on multiple fronts. The Center for Investigative Reporting, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and numerous other publications have also filed lawsuits against AI firms. On the partnership front, dozens of publishers have entered into licensing agreements with OpenAI—including the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Vox Media—and The New York Times itself previously signed an agreement with Amazon permitting its content to appear in Amazon’s AI tools.
The Trump administration’s statement of interest is not a judicial ruling and carries no binding authority over the court. However, the intervention carries significant political weight, particularly as President Trump pursues an independent defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The Trump administration has repeatedly deployed “statements of interest” in private litigation to advance its policy agenda, with one official once describing the strategy as “enormously successful.”
The question of fair use in AI training has yet to receive a definitive ruling from the supreme court, and the NYT v. OpenAI case could provide the U.S. judicial system an opportunity to establish clearer legal boundaries.