Trump administration backs OpenAI in NYT copyright case

The Trump administration has filed a 20-page brief in the lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI, defending the ChatGPT maker’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its large language models. The brief cites an executive order President Trump signed last year, arguing 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,” and that it is critical for the country to retain global leadership in AI.

LLMs powering chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on vast databases of published work, including copyrighted books and articles that AI companies feed into those databases without permission. The New York Times and other publishers argue that this practice is illegal. The dispute turns on fair use, a copyright-law carve-out that can make it legal to use someone else’s copyrighted work without permission if the use is “transformative” enough — the core question dividing this case.

“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 argues.

Court rulings on AI training and copyright have so far mostly favored AI companies. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to a group of writers — but Anthropic wasn’t penalized for training its models on their work; it was fined for using illegal shadow libraries to pirate the books it used for training. Alsup compared the training process to a human reader learning from a book, writing that Anthropic’s models trained on the works “not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”

The Trump administration’s brief is not a ruling — the case is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the brief’s authors have no jurisdiction over the outcome — but the intervention could still carry weight with the court.

Why it matters

The intervention shows the administration treating AI-training copyright fights as a matter of national competitiveness, a framing that could influence how courts weigh “fair use” in this and future cases even though the brief carries no binding authority.