The United States government has filed in support of OpenAI in the copyright case brought by The New York Times, telling a federal judge that training language models on copyrighted journalism is fair use.
What the department argued
The Justice Department’s filing rests on two claims. The first is legal: that training sufficiently transforms the written work into something new, which is the core of a fair-use defence. The second is not legal at all. The department told the court 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 argued that ruling for OpenAI would bolster American innovation and national security.
That second argument asks a copyright court to weigh industrial policy. Fair use is a four-factor test about the work, the use, the amount taken and the market effect. National competitiveness is not one of the factors.
The case it lands in
The New York Times sued OpenAI in 2023, alleging it used large quantities of copyrighted material without permission to train ChatGPT. The matter has since been consolidated with claims from other outlets, including Florida and Arkansas newspapers and The Intercept, alongside individual authors.
The Times’s response
The newspaper was blunt. “The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” it said.
Why a filing is not a ruling
A statement of interest is the government telling a court how it sees a case. It is not binding, and judges are free to disregard it. What it does is put the weight of the executive branch behind one reading of the statute in the case most likely to set the precedent every other AI copyright claim is measured against.
What to watch
Whether the court engages with the national-security framing or confines itself to the statutory factors. If competitiveness enters a fair-use analysis as a live consideration, that reasoning will not stay inside this case.
