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The Trump administration is throwing its weight behind OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times accusing the tech company of mass theft for using the publication’s content to train its AI system.
In a brief backing OpenAI filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, the Justice Department argues that training on copyrighted material constitutes fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license.
The motion appears to be the first time the government has weighed in on novel issues raised by the tech that could have far-reaching implications on news and music publishers and studios in a series of cases against AI companies.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Times said the administration is “siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.”
“Both AI and creators can thrive – AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires,” the spokesperson added. “The Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”
At the forefront of the Justice Department’s position: arguments that restrictions on training will compromise national security since AI can be used for analyzing intelligence, enhancing weapon systems and providing recommendations on the battlefield, like where to target missile strikes, among other things.
“Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States therefore threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered,” states the filing.
Separately, the government claims that limiting fair use would undercut competition in the market for large language models because only the largest tech companies would have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees. Payment of such fees, it adds, would only benefit legacy media outlets and entrench their positions in the market since they have the most content desired by AI companies. The Justice Department envisions a media industry in which independent publishers and authors with limited resources can use AI systems to, for example, generate an image to accompany an article, which otherwise might require a photographer or license.
The government says the question that court should focus on isn’t whether AI causes some loss of readership but whether it creates “significant substitutive competition” for the copyrighted work. It stresses that public access to the articles in which the AI system was trained isn’t provided.
The Justice Department’s brief takes a direct shot at an adverse finding for AI companies from a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit from authors against Meta. It argues that the court improperly collapsed training and outputs into a single continuous use, adopting an indirect substitution theory on market dilution based on the potential use of AI systems to create books and then sell them, competing with books written by human authors.
The government urges the court overseeing the lawsuit against OpenAI not to follow the court’s reasoning in that case that training should require payment because AI-generated works could potentially compete with human-created works.
Book revenue fell most in the genres where AI is the most prevalent, per a 2026 study from Tuhin Chakrabarty.
The Times is one of dozens of news publishers that have sued AI companies over the use of copyrighted material to train AI systems. Most if not all of the cases will be decided on whether the practice constitutes fair use.
Last year, a federal judge rebuffed OpenAI’s bid to dismiss core claims related to copyright infringement while narrowing the scope of the case. OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment.