U.S. government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material

In a lawsuit that the New York Times filed against OpenAI, the Trump administration has contributed a 20-page brief in defense of the ChatGPT maker’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs.

“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… As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,’” the brief reads, referencing an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year.

The LLMs powering chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on incomprehensibly massive databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media that AI companies feed into these databases without permission. Many publishers, including the New York Times in this case, have sought to argue that it is illegal for AI companies like OpenAI to train AI models on their copyrighted material.

This question — can you use copyrighted material to train an AI? — isn’t black and white, hence the extensive legal debate around the subject. These conversations often center on fair use, a carve out of copyright law that makes exceptions for certain scenarios when it can be ruled legal to use someone else’s copyrighted work without permission. In this case, the fair use debate addresses whether AI companies’ use of copyrighted work is “transformative” enough for a judge to rule it legal.

“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 says.