US backs OpenAI's fair-use defense vs NYT

The Trump administration filed a statement of interest in Manhattan federal court on September 2 backing OpenAI’s fair-use defense in the New York Times’ copyright suit over AI training data. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, arguing the companies used millions of its articles without permission to train their models. Reporting describes this as the first time the federal government has formally weighed in on the fair-use question driving the wave of AI training-data lawsuits, a filing that could carry weight in the other pending cases raising the same issue.

The administration’s argument centers on national interest rather than copyright doctrine: it says a “robust” domestic AI industry matters for national security and economic development, and that this favors letting AI companies train on copyrighted text under fair use. The Times pushed back hard:

The administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.

This kind of filing doesn’t bind the court and doesn’t decide the underlying question, this case and the parallel suits from other publishers and authors still have to work through discovery and trial: the Times has separately moved for sanctions over OpenAI’s handling of evidence and widened its suit to target Microsoft, and other publishers are suing Google over Gemini’s training data on the same fair-use theory. What this filing signals is which way federal policy is leaning heading into any future rulemaking or legislation on AI training data: an administration prioritizing AI competitiveness over publisher claims. If your business depends on licensing content to or from AI labs, this filing is a data point that federal policy currently favors the lab side of that negotiation, not a settled legal outcome you can build a compliance plan around yet.