AI Copyright / Fair Use Market: US Government Sides With OpenAI in Copyright Training Lawsuit

The Trump administration has filed a 20-page legal brief in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI, arguing that AI companies should be allowed to train large language models on copyrighted material without explicit permission. The brief asserts that the United States has a strong interest in maintaining global leadership in artificial intelligence and warns against constraining LLM development under what it calls a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine. It is not a ruling; the case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The intervention could influence the ongoing fair-use debate, which centers on whether training AI on copyrighted works is transformative. The article also notes a related case in which Anthropic was ordered to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to writers, but the penalty was tied to its use of illegal shadow libraries, not to the act of training models on copyrighted texts.