US government sides with OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit

The US Department of Justice filed a statement of interest siding with OpenAI and Microsoft in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit over ChatGPT training data, marking the government's first formal weigh-in on how copyright law applies to AI training.

What's new

TechCrunch reports the government submitted a 20-page brief arguing that using copyrighted material to train large language models qualifies as fair use, and that restricting AI development on copyright grounds would damage US competitiveness. As TechCrunch put it, the filing warns that "constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility."

The brief was filed in the long-running suit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft, which centers on whether training ChatGPT on Times articles without a license infringes copyright. This is reportedly the first time the DOJ has formally intervened in any of the numerous copyright suits filed against AI companies over training data.

Context

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, arguing ChatGPT was trained on millions of its articles and can reproduce close paraphrases of paywalled content. The case has become one of the highest-profile tests of whether AI training on copyrighted text is fair use, with outcomes likely to influence a wave of similar suits against other AI labs. The DOJ's filing follows a broader pattern this year of the federal government publicly backing AI companies in litigation and regulatory disputes it frames as touching US competitiveness and national security.

Why it matters

A DOJ statement of interest doesn't decide the case, but it signals where the federal government wants the law to land on a question that affects the entire AI industry's training practices, not just OpenAI. If courts adopt the government's fair-use framing, it would reduce legal exposure for every lab that trains on copyrighted text without a license, reshaping the economics of content licensing deals AI companies have been signing with publishers. If the Times prevails instead, it would strengthen publishers' leverage to demand licensing payments or block training outright, raising costs across the industry. Either way, this case is now a bellwether the rest of the AI copyright litigation wave is watching.