Trump Admin Teams Up With OpenAI in Its Fight Against the New York Times

Donald Trump and OpenAI have found a common enemy.

Trump’s Department of Justice filed a statement of interest Tuesday in OpenAI’s ongoing copyright fight with The New York Times, arguing that the U.S. has a “strong interest in the question whether training AI models on written works constitutes ‘fair use’ under copyright law.”

The brief also argues that the effective integration of AI is “critical for U.S. national security capabilities” and warns that making it harder to develop AI in the U.S. could give foreign rivals an advantage.

While the brief is non-binding, it gives the court the Justice Department’s interpretation of the copyright issues at the center of the case. Reuters reports that it appears to be the first time the U.S. government has directly weighed in on the dozens of copyright lawsuits against the AI industry.

The New York Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing the companies of violating copyright law by using millions of its articles without permission to train their AI models. The lawsuit also alleges that ChatGPT sometimes reproduces long portions of the newspaper’s articles verbatim.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has argued that its use of copyrighted works for training is protected by fair use because the process transforms the material.