The Trump administration has intervened in the closely watched legal dispute between OpenAI and The New York Times over the use of news content to train artificial intelligence models.
In court papers filed on Tuesday, the US Justice Department supported OpenAI’s argument that training its models on troves of writings found on the internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law.
The Justice Department wrote that “the creative possibilities and public benefits” of training large language models on such content “far outweigh any competitive harm.”
It told the court that siding with The New York Times and other publishers who argue OpenAI’s practice violates copyright law would thwart “creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”
“The entire reason that AI models are rapidly reshaping the economy and national security is that they help people, including those working in creative fields, make things and get things done,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.
The “creative benefits often overlap with national security interests,” the department added, because AI models can “help national security officials analyse and draw inferences from (unprotected) real-world facts such as those conveyed in New York Times articles.”
Times criticises government’s position
The lawsuit and the government’s involvement reflect a broader global debate over how legal and regulatory frameworks are adapting to the rapid growth of AI technologies.
In many cases, disputes about AI and its practices are winding their way through courts that still lack precedents — and in some cases language — to match the subject matter.
The New York Times said on Wednesday that 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, a spokesperson for the paper, said in an emailed statement.
“The Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”
“OpenAI threatens financial livelihood”
The Times sued OpenAI in 2023, arguing that the company was threatening its journalists’ livelihoods by effectively stealing billions of dollars’ worth of their work, in some cases spitting out The Times’ material verbatim to people seeking answers from generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT.
The threat to news publications became even more apparent when, in 2024, Google introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of online search results, cutting off the advertising dollars that come when people click a link to the information’s original source.
The Times has since been joined by other news organisations, including MediaNews Group-owned newspapers the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, digital media publisher Ziff Davis and the nonprofit Centre for Investigative Reporting.
In its original lawsuit and an amended complaint filed earlier this year, it focused on the unfair competition of companies that “seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”
