The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab.

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.