OpenAI gains U.S. government backing in New York Times copyright training case

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OpenAI gains U.S. backing in copyright case

Highlights

The Trump administration filed a 20-page brief supporting OpenAI’s fair use claim in the New York Times copyright training lawsuit, citing U.S. AI competitiveness.
The government argues that restricting LLM development based on misinterpretations of fair use doctrine would harm creative, scientific, and economic progress in the U.S.
Recent court cases generally favor AI companies on training data issues, with penalties—such as Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement—stemming from illegal data acquisition, not training itself.

Federal brief backs fair use argument

As reported by TechCrunch, the Trump administration has filed a 20-page brief supporting OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material to train large language models in the lawsuit brought by the New York Times. The filing says the U.S. has a strong interest in maintaining a competitive artificial intelligence industry and cites an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last year on retaining global leadership in the sector.

The dispute centers on whether training systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini on vast collections of books, articles and other media without permission qualifies as fair use under copyright law. The key legal question is whether that use is sufficiently transformative for a court to find it lawful.

The government brief says restricting LLM development based on what it describes as a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would undermine creative and scientific progress while also hurting American prosperity and economic mobility.

Potential impact on AI copyright litigation

The filing is not a ruling, and the case remains before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Even so, the administration’s intervention could carry weight as courts continue to shape the legal boundaries for AI model development.

Recent cases on AI training and copyright have generally favored AI companies on the training issue itself. In a case involving Anthropic, Judge William Alsup ordered the company to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to writers whose works were used to train its models, but the penalty related to the use of illegal shadow libraries to obtain books rather than the act of model training alone.

Alsup wrote that Anthropic’s models trained on works not to replicate or replace them, but to create something different, comparing that process to a human reading a book. That reasoning has become part of a broader industry argument that AI training can be treated as transformative use under existing copyright law.

Our previous coverage of the House Financial Services Committee hearing on the Trump administration’s pro-growth regulatory agenda explained how lawmakers are evaluating its effects on affordability, investment, and access to capital. The article highlighted Republicans’ efforts to turn recent regulatory changes into durable legislation aimed at expanding housing supply, supporting community lenders, and strengthening U.S. leadership in financial innovation.

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