“AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans,” U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said as the Trump administration entered a copyright fight that could shape the rules for generative artificial intelligence.
The Justice Department filed a 20-page brief in Manhattan federal court on September 2 supporting OpenAI in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times. The government defended OpenAI’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its large language models, or LLMs, and argued that such training qualifies as fair use under copyright law.
The intervention is the first instance of the U.S. government stepping into the growing wave of copyright litigation over the use of work to train AI systems. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that the companies ingested millions of its articles without permission to build ChatGPT.
The administration told the court: “The United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law.” It characterised AI training as “extraordinarily” transformative.
The government’s position places national competitiveness at the centre of a dispute that has pitted AI companies against news organisations, authors, publishers, music labels and other copyright owners. Copyright claims involving OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms have raised the question of whether companies can use protected work to develop AI systems without permission or compensation.
In its filing, the administration argued that the stakes extend beyond the Times case. “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,” the brief said.
It added: “Beyond the subject matter of this litigation, LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs.” The administration argued that allowing models to train on copyrighted work would preserve “American prosperity”.
“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 said.
Woodward said the administration would pursue that position in the face of foreign competition. “This Administration will never let our Nation be at a disadvantage relative to our foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law,” he said.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made a related appeal to G20 officials gathered in North Carolina on Wednesday. He urged nations to adopt fair use principles that would permit AI companies to use creators’ work for training.
The Times has continued to press its case against OpenAI and Microsoft. Earlier this year, the Times and 16 other media organisations sought sanctions against OpenAI, alleging that the company withheld and destroyed evidence. The Times has spent more than $28 million on AI-related litigation, according to regulatory filings.
Courts have yet to establish a single approach to the issue. The first two judicial decisions on whether AI systems’ use of copyrighted material qualifies as fair use, both issued last year, came down on opposite sides.
The Justice Department’s filing gives the court a clear statement of the administration’s view: fair use should protect AI training, and legal limits on that practice could affect US scientific progress, economic mobility and national security. The Manhattan case will test that argument against the Times’s claim that its journalism was used without permission to build a commercial AI product.
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