OpenAI Gets US Government Backing in Major AI Copyright Fight

The US government is backing OpenAI and Microsoft in their high-stakes copyright fight with The New York Times, arguing that training AI models on copyrighted works constitutes fair use and that restricting the practice could give foreign rivals an advantage. In a 20-page statement filed Sept. 1 in Manhattan federal court, the Justice Department urged Judge Sidney H. Stein to reject the Times' argument that training large language models on copyrighted texts violates copyright law, citing concerns from scientific advancement to national security. The government argued that AI training is highly transformative, contending that copying works to teach an LLM statistical patterns differs fundamentally from reproducing the works themselves. The filing drew an unusual parallel: when a teenage Joan Didion typed out Ernest Hemingway's stories "to learn how the sentences worked," she wasn't infringing copyright. The Times fired back, with spokesperson Graham James accusing the administration of "siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole," adding that "AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires." The DOJ's most striking argument concerns market dynamics: requiring licensing fees would create an AI oligopoly, benefiting only the wealthiest tech companies while "disproportionately benefit legacy media outlets" with the largest archives. However, the government's intervention does not settle whether AI training is fair use. Courts have reached different conclusions in related cases, with a judge in the Anthropic litigation finding fair use for training but not for pirated copies, and Meta prevailing in a separate case. That uncertainty means the New York Times case remains important, as a ruling could influence whether AI developers must negotiate licenses for more of the material used to train their models