Trump Administration Sides With OpenAI Over The New York Times: Restricting AI Training Would Hinder 'American Prosperity'

The Trump administration filed a 20-page brief backing OpenAI’s use of copyrighted works without licenses to train large language models in its ongoing lawsuit filed by the New York Times in July.

"The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally," states the brief filed in the Southern District of New York.

The filing weighs in on one of the biggest unresolved legal questions facing the AI industry: whether companies can train models on copyrighted material without first obtaining permission. Systems such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are trained on enormous collections of published works, including books, articles and other copyrighted material. Publishers have argued that using those works without licenses violates copyright law.

The U.S. argues that training LLMs on copyrighted material should qualify as fair use, warning that a narrower interpretation would slow AI development, limit scientific and creative advances, and make the market less competitive by allowing only the biggest companies to afford licensing fees. 

"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 brief stated

Ultimately, the government is urging the court not to impose broad copyright liability on AI training without licensing.

The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case. But it would be problematic—and legally incorrect—to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing. LLM training is "consistent with that creative ‘progress’ that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself," the brief concluded.

Anthropic experienced a similar lawsuit earlier this year related to copyright infringement. 

In July, a federal judge in San Francisco granted final approval to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion class-action settlement with a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence startup of improperly using their books to train its Claude chatbot.

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2024, was one of dozens brought by authors, publishers and other copyright holders against AI companies over the use of copyrighted works to train large language models.

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