The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, presenting a legal argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleges that OpenAI unlawfully trained its systems on the newspaper's articles, seeking billions of dollars in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the Trump administration filed a "statement of interest" in the case, supporting OpenAI’s argument that training an AI model on copyrighted text constitutes fair use. "The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs)," US attorneys wrote in the statement. They argued that such a result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and would severely hamper "the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The attorneys further noted that LLMs are already helping researchers achieve major breakthroughs, and that constraining their development based on a misunderstanding of fair use would thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity. The Trump administration has frequently utilized statements of interest in private litigation to advance its policy goals. It has previously argued that AI training should count as fair use, a position reflected in its National AI Legislative Framework. Notably, Trump holds a personal animus toward the Times, against which he is currently pursuing a separate defamation suit. The Times case could set a precedent for other media outlets frustrated by AI systems training on their work. Copyright disputes have intensified in recent years, with lawsuits filed by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News. In a milestone 2025 decision, a judge found that Anthropic could legally train its models on lawfully purchased books.