DOJ sides with OpenAI over NY Times in lawsuit alleging AI copyright infringement

The Justice Department is backing OpenAI in its high-stakes legal battle with the New York Times, arguing in a court filing that using copyrighted content to train artificial intelligence models does not violate the law.

The Times first sued OpenAI and key investor Microsoft in December 2023, alleging in Manhattan federal court that the ChatGPT creator had used “millions” of its copyrighted articles to build AI products that directly compete with the newspaper. It is one of several lawsuits accusing OpenAI and other AI giants of copyright infringement.

“The United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” DOJ officials wrote in the court brief published Wednesday.

To justify its stance, the DOJ argued that an adverse ruling in the Times’ favor would hamper development of AI models that “will be critical for US national security capabilities, in part because foreign adversaries won’t be held back by copyright law.

The agency also expressed concern that a ruling against OpenAI “would hamper competition in the market for LLMs, because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees.”