The report
The Justice Department’s statement of interest backing OpenAI and Microsoft in the New York Times copyright case surprised the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office, sources told Axios in a report updated on Saturday, published via Yahoo News.
The filing argues that using copyrighted works to train AI models should qualify as fair use because the practice is “new and transformative”. It takes no position on whether AI-generated outputs get the same protection.
Why the omission matters
A statement of interest is not a neutral document. It is the federal government telling a court what the United States thinks, and its weight comes from the assumption that the executive branch has worked out an internal position first.
The Copyright Office is the agency that registers copyrights and advises Congress on them; the USPTO is the agency that has spent years consulting on AI and intellectual property. If neither was consulted, the brief is one department’s litigation position wearing the government’s voice.
The filing also characterised the Copyright Office’s own position as “threadbare” and said it “does not warrant deference” — a government lawyer telling a judge to disregard another part of the government.
The signature line
Axios reports a second unusual detail: no career antitrust attorneys signed the filing alongside senior DOJ officials. In an ordinary statement of interest, career staff signatures are what signal that the position survived internal review.
The brief also argued that the success of the US AI industry is an important national security interest — a framing that sits outside copyright doctrine entirely, and closer to the administration’s stated position that the race with China settles most AI questions.
What it does and does not change
Legally, very little. A statement of interest is advocacy; it binds no court and decides nothing. Judges in the consolidated OpenAI cases will reach fair use on the record in front of them, and the Times litigation has its own schedule.
What it changes is the information environment. A court reading “the United States submits” reads it as settled; the reporting suggests it was not. The Times case is also the one where unsealed filings last week quoted a Microsoft director describing AI scraping as a theft of labour, which is the opposite argument arriving through the same docket.
What to watch
Whether the Copyright Office or the USPTO says anything publicly. Agencies rarely contradict a DOJ filing in the open, and if either does, it would be the clearest signal yet that the administration does not have one AI copyright position but two.
