The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit
The Verge Hayden Field ● Covered by 2 sources
Trump’s administration backed OpenAI in the New York Times copyright case. It’s a big sign that the fight over training AI on news text isn’t just legal — it’s political too.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Hayden Field — read the original for the full story.
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The Trump administration has stepped into The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s doing so on OpenAI’s side. That’s a notable turn in a case that has become one of the clearest tests of how far copyright law reaches when companies train AI systems on published work.
The lawsuit was filed in December 2023. The Times says OpenAI trained its systems on its articles without permission and is seeking billions of dollars in damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft. This week, the administration filed a statement of interest, which is basically the government’s way of saying: we have a view here, and the court should hear it.
That view lines up with OpenAI’s central defense. The company argues that training an AI model on copyrighted text can count as fair use. The administration backed that position, saying the Times is trying to tighten fair-use rules so much that OpenAI’s large language models would be excluded from them.
That matters because this case is no longer just about one newspaper and one AI company. It’s about whether the legal system treats model training as a permitted use of copyrighted material, or as something that needs a much narrower line. The answer could shape how every other AI company trains its systems, and what rights publishers can still enforce.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of move that tells you the real battle is over who gets to define “fair use” for AI, not whether the models are impressive. The administration backing OpenAI is a clean signal: power likes flexible copyright when it wants faster machine progress. Publishers, meanwhile, are left doing the unglamorous work of insisting that “trained on it” still means “used it.”
Read more about this at: The Verge