Fair Use

The Trump administration sided with OpenAI in a lawsuit brought by the New York Times, defending training AI models on copyrighted works, according to a court document filed Tuesday. In late 2023, the Times sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies' powerful AI models used millions of articles for training without permission.

The Justice Department said in a 20-page document that the "creative possibilities and public benefits that LLM training advances far outweigh any competitive harm." It argued that training AI models on written works is "exceedingly transformative," allowing it to benefit from the "fair use" exception that permits copyrighted work to be used without the rights holders' consent.

AI dominance

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said Trump has made clear that "AI dominance is critical" to national security, prosperity and economic mobility. "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," Woodward wrote on X.

The Times' spokesman called it siding with "trillion-dollar AI companies" at the expense of American creators, saying it "would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function." In July, a US judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and several authors, with a partial ruling that training on books was transformative enough to constitute fair use.