Justice Department backs OpenAI in NYT copyright fight, cites national security

Times spokesman says DOJ is siding with trillion-dollar AI companies

The Justice Department has urged a federal court to side with OpenAI in the company’s copyright fight with the New York Times and other publishers, telling the court that training large language models on copyrighted news content should be treated as fair use.

In the letter submitted this week, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said restricting AI training on copyrighted material would be “inconsistent with basic copyright law principles” and would hold back creative and scientific progress. The department also asserted that training AI on written works is “exceedingly transformative” and does not hamper the market or the value of the underlying copyrighted works.

The department framed the dispute in national-security terms. “Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States therefore threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered,” the filing said.

A Times spokesman pushed back. “The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” the spokesman said in a statement. The administration’s stance, the spokesman added, would “undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”

The Times filed its copyright suit against Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, alleging that ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot had trained on millions of Times articles and used that material to generate answers to user prompts. The suit helped spark a wave of litigation over generative AI in the publishing industry, with publishers split between licensing their content to AI companies and going to court to defend their intellectual property. News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, has struck a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

The Justice Department’s filing also argued that narrowing fair use could weaken competition in AI development. Only “the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees,” the department said, and a narrower fair-use doctrine would “disproportionately benefit legacy media outlets” because they hold larger content archives than smaller independent publishers.

The Trump administration has generally taken a light-touch approach to regulating AI, arguing that the United States needs to outpace China in the race for technological supremacy. President Trump has personally filed lawsuits against both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal over their coverage.

The court filing arrives days before both sides are expected to submit new motions asking the judge to rule in their favor on at least some of their core arguments, after completing the discovery phase of the case.