Trump administration backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit

The Trump administration has formally intervened in the high-stakes Manhattan federal court litigation between The New York Times and OpenAI, submitting a 20-page brief in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that defends the ChatGPT maker's right to train large language models on copyrighted works without obtaining permission, according to reports by Wired and TechCrunch. The filing marks the first time the federal government has intervened directly in artificial intelligence copyright litigation involving a major publisher, as detailed by Crypto Briefing.

The federal filing frames unlicensed AI training not merely as a commercial tech dispute, but as an urgent geopolitical imperative. By throwing its weight behind OpenAI, the administration signals that restricting the ingestion of published material would jeopardize U.S. Competitiveness against foreign adversaries and stifle domestic economic mobility, according to Yahoo Finance and The Guardian. The government's brief contends that the United States holds a vital stake in maintaining a robust AI industry that sets global standards, pointing directly to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last year regarding global leadership in the technology.

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Behind the political rhetoric lies a fundamental technical mechanism: large language models ingest billions of lines of text, using statistical analysis to predict subsequent words based on user queries. The administration's brief argues that this data ingestion process is extraordinarily transformative because the resulting systems meaningfully alter their inputs rather than simply replicating them. Furthermore, the government contends that these tools do not directly compete with published journalism, satisfying core judicial criteria for fair use.

Federal officials defended the practice by drawing historical analogies within the brief. The filing compared machine learning ingestion to how a teenage Joan Didion typed out Ernest Hemingway’s stories to master her craft, warning that broad liability would render human learning practices legally perilous as well.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. Emphasized the administration's defensive posture in a statement posted to X, declaring that AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans, and adding that the administration will not let the nation fall behind foreign adversaries due to what he termed an incorrect understanding of copyright law, as reported by The Guardian. Meanwhile, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told G20 officials at a meeting in North Carolina on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, that international partners should embrace fair use while simultaneously seeking ways to protect artists.

Publishers, authors, and music labels view the federal intervention with sharp alarm. Media companies and creators argue that trillion-dollar tech firms are systematically exploiting livelihoods without financial compensation, pointing to copyright laws that never anticipated automated systems consuming the entire corpus of human writing in weeks.

"The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole. Both AI and creators can thrive–AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires."

Graham James, Spokesperson, The New York Times, via Wired

Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild—which filed its own separate lawsuit against OpenAI—echoed those grievances to Wired, calling the administration's letter replete with faulty arguments and a gross misunderstanding of the fair use doctrine and copyright law.

The intervention lands amid a fractured judicial landscape where earlier courts delivered diverging signals. In Kadrey v. Meta, Meta technically prevailed when a judge ruled that plaintiffs failed to prove direct harm, though the court left open the possibility that unauthorized training could be illegal under different facts. Conversely, Anthropic faced a $1.5 billion class-action settlement with authors, though that penalty stemmed from the company's use of unauthorized shadow libraries to pirate books rather than the AI training process itself, which the presiding judge categorized as fair use akin to a human reading a book, according to Techcrunch and Wired. The legal pressure continues to expand, with Sony, Warner Music, and Universal Music Group filing separate infringement lawsuits against Anthropic over the training of its Claude chatbot.

Overview of the Federal Intervention

• The U.S. Government filed a 20-page brief in the Southern District of New York supporting OpenAI.
• The administration argued that restricting large language model training threatens U.S. Global AI leadership and economic prosperity.
• The filing marks the first time the federal government has formally intervened in an AI copyright dispute involving a major publisher.
• Intellectual property lawyers note that while the advisory letter lacks binding legal authority, judges will likely take it seriously due to its Department of Justice origin.

U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein oversees the ongoing New York Times proceedings, where the publisher recently filed a motion for sanctions accusing OpenAI of concealing data access and manipulating ChatGPT conversation logs during discovery. While Judge Stein is not legally bound to follow the Department of Justice advisory letter, intellectual property lawyers note that federal filings of this nature carry significant institutional weight as dozens of active copyright challenges hang in the balance.