The Trump administration is backing OpenAI in its copyright battle with The New York Times, arguing that using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models can be protected by fair use.
The administration filed a statement of interest in the case Wednesday, according to a filing first flagged by Puck’s Eriq Gardner. The move puts the federal government squarely into a closely watched fight over whether AI companies can use copyrighted works to train their models without permission from or payment to rights holders.
“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” a New York Times spokesperson told TheWrap. “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.”
The spokesperson added: “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.”
The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing the companies of using millions of its copyrighted articles without permission to train their AI models. The newspaper has argued that products like ChatGPT can compete with its journalism and deprive it of subscription, licensing and ad revenue.
OpenAI has denied wrongdoing and maintained that training AI models on publicly available material is protected under the fair use doctrine.
“Training AI models using publicly available Internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents,” OpenAI previously said. The company has also argued that this principle is necessary for innovation and critical to maintaining U.S. competitiveness in artificial intelligence.
The Trump administration’s intervention comes as publishers, entertainment companies and other copyright owners grapple with how existing copyright law applies to generative AI.
The Times’ lawsuit is among a growing number of copyright cases brought against AI companies by publishers, authors, artists and other content owners. In June, a coalition of nearly 400 news publishers sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their content was scraped without permission or compensation to train AI products.
The fight has implications beyond the news business. Studios, unions and creators in Hollywood have also wrestled with how generative AI can use copyrighted material and creative work. More than 400 Hollywood creatives and executives urged the Trump administration last year to reject proposals from OpenAI and Google that they argued would weaken copyright protections for their work.
The Times and more than a dozen other media organizations sought sanctions against OpenAI in July, accusing the company of withholding evidence during discovery in their copyright litigation.
OpenAI disputed those allegations and said it would continue defending its users’ privacy and “the long-established principles of fair use.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
