By Rajwa Quasim
The Trump administration filed a brief Tuesday in Manhattan federal court supporting OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times over the fair use of copyrighted material to train AI models.
The lawsuit, first filed in 2023, accuses OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, of using millions of New York Times articles to train their AI models without permission. The newspaper argued that the unauthorized use threatens its business and constitutes copyright infringement.
The U.S. government’s filing Tuesday defended the AI company, arguing that restricting AI companies from training their systems on copyrighted material could eventually slow technological development in the country. Such restrictions could have implications for scientific progress, national security and the U.S. economy.
The brief said, “The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally. […] As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence’.”
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The brief further argued that using copyrighted material to train AI models constitutes fair use. Although the Trump administration’s position has no legal force in the case, its support could bolster major technology companies’ efforts to defend their practices.
The government also argued that large language models (LLMs) are already helping researchers make important breakthroughs in various fields. Unnecessary restrictions on the development of LLMs based on an incorrect interpretation of fair use laws could slow the country’s progress, the brief said.
“The United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law based on concerns including scientific advancement and national security,” it added.
Meanwhile, a New York Times spokesperson countered the administration’s argument, saying AI companies and creators can thrive through mutual agreements.
“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 said.
The spokesperson further said the administration was siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of countless American creators whose work they stole.
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Multiple authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets have also filed lawsuits against technology companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms, accusing them of similar copyright violations. AI chatbots are trained using vast amounts of text and other data. The systems analyze that training data to generate responses by predicting the most likely words based on a user’s query.
In another development, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has urged G20 countries to establish policies that allow AI companies to train their models using copyrighted materials under a fair use principle that protects artists and creators while also benefiting AI companies.
The use of copyrighted material by AI companies has been the subject of public debate for years. In June 2025, a district judge in San Francisco sided with Anthropic in a similar case, calling the use of books for AI training “quintessentially transformative.”
However, the court found the company liable for storing millions of pirated books in a central library that was not tied to the AI training process. The case was later settled in December 2025. Anthropic and other companies have also been accused of bulk-buying rare books and scanning them to train AI models before destroying them.
In contrast, Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco ruled against Meta, finding that the use of copyrighted material for AI training in most cases could not be considered fair use.