The Pulse
DOJ backs OpenAI’s fair-use defense in NYT case
The Justice Department’s filing supports OpenAI’s fair-use argument in its copyright fight with The New York Times, where summary-judgment motions were filed Sept. 4.
AI.info Team ·
“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.”
Graham James, spokesperson for The New York Times
The Justice Department has taken OpenAI’s side in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit, urging a Manhattan federal court to find that training artificial intelligence models on copyrighted writing does not, by itself, violate copyright law.
The government filed a statement of interest on September 1 in the consolidated litigation before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein. The filing argues that training large language models is a transformative use of copyrighted material and says the creative and public benefits of the technology outweigh the competitive harm claimed by publishers.
The intervention gives OpenAI and Microsoft support from the federal government as the parties’ summary-judgment motions move before the court. It does not decide the case, and the Justice Department is not a party to the lawsuit.
Washington frames training as a national-security issue
Justice Department lawyers argue that artificial intelligence development serves a national interest extending beyond the commercial dispute between OpenAI, Microsoft and The Times. A ruling that broadly subjected model training to copyright liability, they wrote, could hinder scientific progress, economic mobility and America’s ability to compete in advanced technology.
The filing also links AI capabilities to national-security work. Government lawyers say models can help officials analyze and draw inferences from real-world facts, including facts reported in news articles. They argue that requiring licenses for every copyrighted work used in training could raise costs high enough to limit competition to the largest technology companies.
“It would be problematic—and legally incorrect—to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing,” the department wrote in the filing.
The DOJ separates training from what models produce
The government’s position focuses on the training process rather than every possible output from a chatbot. OpenAI has argued that training converts written works into statistical information used to predict language, rather than storing articles as a conventional searchable database. The Times argues that OpenAI copied millions of articles without permission, used them to build commercial products and sometimes generated passages that closely reproduced its reporting.
That distinction leaves room for separate disputes over outputs that reproduce protected expression. The Justice Department’s support for training does not amount to a finding that every answer produced by ChatGPT or another model is lawful.
OpenAI and Microsoft have denied The Times’ allegations. They maintain that their use of published material creates new systems and falls within the fair-use doctrine, which weighs the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount copied and the effect on the market for the original.
The Times says the ruling could weaken journalism
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that the companies used its journalism to develop ChatGPT and other AI systems without authorization. The newspaper says those systems can act as substitutes for its reporting, weaken subscriptions and advertising opportunities, and reproduce portions of articles in response to user prompts.
Graham James, a Times spokesperson, said the administration was siding with “a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies” instead of American creators. He said allowing companies to take copyrighted work without permission or payment would damage the human-created material that AI systems depend on.
The Times’ lawsuit now sits within a broader group of copyright cases involving OpenAI, Microsoft, authors and other publishers. Several news organizations have brought related claims, while writers have separately alleged that books were copied for model training.
Judge Stein faces competing claims after summary-judgment filings
The parties filed summary-judgment motions on September 4. Those filings ask the court to decide whether central legal questions can be resolved without a trial.
The Times is seeking to establish that OpenAI and Microsoft’s use of its articles was unlawful. The defendants argue that their fair-use defense should be accepted and that model training does not create broad liability whenever copyrighted works appear in a dataset.
The Justice Department’s filing strengthens that defense but does not bind Judge Stein. The judge must still assess the specific conduct alleged by The Times, including the source material used, the operation of the models and the evidence that some outputs reproduced newspaper articles.
A federal endorsement with limits
The filing marks the first Justice Department intervention in the growing wave of litigation over copyrighted material and AI training, according to reporting by The New York Times. Its argument gives OpenAI a powerful ally in court and places national security alongside the traditional fair-use factors.
For publishers, the immediate concern is not only whether OpenAI wins this case. A broad ruling for the company could weaken the threat of copyright lawsuits as a way to force licensing agreements, leaving Congress or private negotiations to determine whether creators receive payment for training data.
The September 4 summary-judgment filings are now before the Southern District of New York. The Justice Department’s September 1 filing did not itself establish that schedule.