The Trump administration has formally intervened in The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft by submitting a statement of interest. Government attorneys argued that training artificial intelligence models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use under existing U.S. law. The filing claims that restricting model training would harm scientific progress, national economic mobility, and broad innovation.
The New York Times filed its suit in December 2023, seeking billions in damages and alleging that OpenAI illegally utilized its journalistic content to train language models. Government lawyers countered that setting a broad legal precedent of copyright liability for training datasets would misinterpret fair-use principles and hamper American technological competitiveness.
This legal filing reinforces the current administration’s public policy stance laid out in its National AI Legislative Framework. The case remains a pivotal legal battle point for the AI sector, as media organizations continue to split between pursuing copyright litigation and entering commercial licensing agreements with frontier model providers.
Why it matters
AI founders get strong legal backing from federal filings asserting that model training on public data constitutes protected fair use.
Media and enterprise copyright holders face increasing judicial and executive pressure favoring broad data ingestion without mandatory licensing.
Legal teams must track evolving judicial precedents following contrasting outcomes like Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement and publisher licensing deals.
Source: theverge.com
