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The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit Letting models train on copyrighted work will preserve ‘American prosperity,’ it says. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup “billions of dollars” in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI’s argument that it’s fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text. “The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAl’s large language models (LLMs),” US attorneys wrote in the statement. “That result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts.’” The attorneys went on to write that “LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs” and that “constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.” The Trump administration has leaned heavily on statements of interest in private litigation, which one official has called “incredibly” successful at advancing its policy aims. It’s argued previously that AI training should count as fair use, making the case in its National AI Legislative Framework. Trump also holds a personal animus toward the Times, against which he is currently pursuing a defamation suit. The Times case could set precedent for other media outlets frustrated over AI systems training on their work. Copyright disagreements between media outlets and AI labs have intensified in recent years, including lawsuits from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago Tribune, and New York Daily News. In a milestone 2025 decision, a judge found Anthropic could legally train its models on lawfully purchased books, but that it could still be held liable for piracy, resulting in a $1.5 billion settlement with authors. At the same time, dozens of media outlets have inked licensing deals with OpenAI, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Vox Media. In 2025, The New York Times entered into a licensing deal with Amazon allowing its editorial content, including news articles and recipes, to appear in Amazon’s generative AI tools. “The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case,” the US attorneys wrote in the statement. “But it would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of Al models impermissible without licensing. LLM training is ‘consistent with that creative ‘progress’ that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself.’”
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