Trump administration backs OpenAI against New York Times copyright suit

The latest:

The US government has intervened on OpenAI’s side in the New York Times copyright case, telling a court on Wednesday that restricting the AI group’s ability to train on millions of articles would thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility. The Financial Times reported the Department of Justice said the US has a strong interest in the court rejecting arguments that training large language models on copyrighted texts violates copyright law.

Details:

• The lawsuit: The New York Times sued OpenAI in 2023, alleging the company took a free ride by using large volumes of copyrighted material to build its chatbot. The Financial Times valued OpenAI at $852bn, making the government’s intervention on the side of a private company in an active copyright dispute unusual in scale.
• The legal argument: According to the filing, the Department of Justice cited several executive orders signed by President Donald Trump that mandate the government to take measures ensuring American AI dominance. The department framed the copyright question as bound up with national prosperity rather than as a narrow dispute between two private parties.
• The Times responds: Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times, said the administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of countless American creators whose work they stole. He said AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.
• The publisher’s warning: James added that allowing companies to take content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI itself needs to function. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
• The DOJ framing: Associate attorney-general Stanley Woodward described the intervention as “historic” and said it matched the president’s view that AI dominance is critical to national security, prosperity and economic mobility. Writing on X, he said the administration would never let the nation be disadvantaged against foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law.
• Wider stakes: The Financial Times reported the intervention could prove significant in dozens of lawsuits filed by creators, publishers and copyright holders accusing AI labs of taking content to train models without permission or payment. The filing does not resolve any of those cases, but supplies AI defendants with the federal government’s own legal position.
• Policy backdrop: The move came days after Trump broke with many of his own voters and Republican strategists by calling for more AI data centre construction, saying opponents of such projects want to be backwards and poor. The White House has also opposed Republican efforts across the US to regulate AI strictly, favouring light-touch voluntary oversight.
• Trump and the Times: The president has frequently clashed with The New York Times and is personally pursuing a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the newspaper, refiled last week. The Times denies wrongdoing in that case, which runs on a separate track from the copyright litigation the Justice Department has now entered.
• The OpenAI ties: OpenAI has separately held discussions with the Trump administration about giving the public a roughly 5 per cent stake in the company. Co-founder Greg Brockman is among the largest donors to Maga Inc, the main political fundraising group supporting Trump.

Between the lines:

The government’s own filing ties its copyright position to executive orders on AI dominance, which places the argument on industrial-policy ground rather than on the fair-use questions the court must decide. That framing, combined with the administration’s separate stake discussions with OpenAI and Brockman’s donations, is what the Times spokesperson’s charge of favouritism draws on.

What’s next

Watch how the court weighs the government’s brief on the fair-use question, whether other AI defendants cite it in the dozens of pending publisher suits, and the next filings in Trump’s separate $15bn defamation case.