DOJ Sides with OpenAI, Warns Obstacles to AI Development Threaten National Security

“Even putting aside the fact that human beings use LLMs to create, the Kadrey court’s application of the fourth fair-use factor is deeply flawed.” – DOJ statement

Department of Justice

On September 1, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a Statement of Interest urging the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to hold that using copyrighted written works to train large language models (LLMs) is fair use, arguing that a contrary result would distort copyright law, suppress innovation and weaken U.S. competitiveness and national security.

The statement was filed in reference to the multidistrict copyright litigation against OpenAI, although it specifically addressed claims by The New York Times and said its reasoning also applies to the related cases involving book authors and publishers. The government said the generative AI training process is different from collecting works and generating outputs, and that courts must evaluate each alleged use separately.

The statement argues that the cases could have consequences well beyond the parties, and that domestic AI development is important to economic growth and national-security functions. Requiring licenses for model training could create entry barriers that only the largest technology companies could absorb and could concentrate the market for LLMs and disproportionately benefit legacy media organizations with large archives, it argued.