The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' landmark copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, filing a statement of interest that throws the weight of the US government behind the AI industry's central legal argument: that training large language models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. The filing, reported Tuesday by Reuters, The Verge, and other outlets, marks one of the most consequential government interventions yet in the wave of litigation between AI developers and content owners.
The underlying case, filed in December 2023 in federal court in Manhattan, alleges that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on millions of New York Times articles and seeks to recoup what the paper describes as "billions of dollars" in damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft. For ongoing coverage, follow our AI policy news.
What the government argued
In the statement of interest, US attorneys wrote that "The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI's large language models," arguing that such a result "would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper 'the Progress of Science and useful Arts'" — a direct invocation of the constitutional clause that underpins American copyright law.
The filing goes further, adopting the industry's economic framing wholesale. "LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs," the attorneys wrote, warning that "constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress." The government's core claim, as The Verge summarized it, is that letting models train on copyrighted work will preserve "American prosperity."
A statement of interest does not make the government a party to the case, and it does not bind the court. Mechanically, it is a brief in which the United States sets out its view on a question of law that affects its interests — a tool agencies and departments have used in high-stakes technology litigation for decades. Its force is persuasive rather than procedural. But in a case of this magnitude, the signal matters as much as the legal reasoning: it tells Judge Sidney Stein and any future appellate panel where the executive branch stands, and it tells the market that the federal government is prepared to defend AI training as a lawful practice.
That alignment is a reversal of fortune for publishers who once hoped Washington might ride to their rescue. It also aligns the executive branch squarely with AI developers at a moment when the outcome of this litigation could define the economics of the entire sector: if training on copyrighted text is not fair use, AI companies face either licensing costs measured in billions or fundamental changes to how models are built.
A reversal in tone from past copyright enforcement debates
The filing lands amid a broader pattern. The administration has moved consistently to frame AI development as a national priority, and this week's G-20 meetings saw US officials promoting a hands-off approach to AI regulation even as other governments push stricter rules. Billboard reported that the fair-use argument advanced in the filing is being watched closely by the music industry, which is fighting parallel battles with AI companies over training on song lyrics — including the record labels' ongoing case against Anthropic over Claude's reproduction of lyrics.
Publishers, unsurprisingly, see it differently. The Intercept published a pointed response under the headline "Trump Admin Tells Court: Let OpenAI Rip Off The Intercept's Articles," reflecting news organizations' view that the government is endorsing the uncompensated appropriation of their work. News publishers have watched their search referral traffic erode as AI chatbots answer questions directly, making the licensing question existential for an industry already under economic pressure.
What happens next in the case
The statement of interest arrives as the case moves through discovery and pretrial motions more than two and a half years after it was filed. The central legal question — whether copying books, articles, and other texts to train a model that generates new outputs is "transformative" fair use or market-harming infringement — remains unsettled in US courts, with related cases involving authors, news outlets, and visual artists advancing in parallel.
Under the four-factor fair-use test in Section 107 of the Copyright Act, courts weigh the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copied work, the amount taken, and the effect on the market for the original. OpenAI's defense rests on the argument that training is transformative — the copies are used to extract statistical patterns, not to reproduce expressive content — while the Times counters that outputting its articles and substituting for its traffic harms the market directly. Remedies if the paper prevails range from substantial damages to injunctions that could force the retraining of models on licensed data.
Legal observers note that the government's intervention, while symbolic, could matter at the margins: courts weigh fair-use factors flexibly, and the view of the executive branch on the "purpose and character" of AI training may feature in judicial reasoning. But the ultimate decision rests with the court, and neither the administration's filing nor the publishers' objections will shortcut the ordinary appellate path.
For AI companies, the filing is the strongest signal yet that Washington is prepared to defend their core business practice. For content owners, it raises the stakes of a courtroom loss — and increases the appeal of the licensing deals some, including news organizations that signed agreements with OpenAI, have already cut outside litigation. The Times case, with billions in claimed damages, is now the reference point for both strategies.
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