US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material

In a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, the Trump administration contributed a 20-page brief defending the ChatGPT maker’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its large language models. The brief emphasizes that the United States has a strong interest in developing a competitive artificial intelligence industry and retaining global leadership. LLMs powering conversational chatbots are trained on massive databases containing published works, books, and articles fed into systems without explicit permission. Publishers, including The New York Times, argue that training models on copyrighted material without a license is illegal. The ongoing legal debate centers heavily on the doctrine of fair use and whether AI companies' utilization of copyrighted works is sufficiently transformative. The government brief cautions that constraining LLM development under misunderstandings of fair use would thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American economic mobility. To date, several legal cases regarding AI training and copyright have favored AI tech companies, such as a previous ruling involving Anthropic and a group of writers.