The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, filing an argument in support of the AI lab. The move places the federal government firmly behind the position that using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence systems qualifies as fair use.
The landmark case, filed in December 2023, alleges that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles published by The New York Times. The publisher is seeking to recover “billions of dollars” in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the administration submitted a statement of interest in the proceedings, siding with OpenAI’s claim that training an AI model on copyrighted text falls within the bounds of fair use.
“The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs),” US attorneys wrote. “That result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'” The attorneys added that “LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs” and warned that misapplying fair-use doctrine “would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”
A Pattern of Intervention in Private Litigation
The administration has relied heavily on statements of interest in private cases, with one official describing the tactic as “incredibly” effective at advancing policy aims. It has previously argued that AI training should count as fair use, setting out that position in its National AI Legislative Framework. President Trump also holds a personal grievance against the Times, against which he is currently pursuing a defamation suit.
The New York Times case could establish precedent for other media organisations frustrated by AI systems trained on their work. Copyright disputes between publishers and AI developers have intensified in recent years, with lawsuits brought by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. In a significant 2025 ruling, a judge found that Anthropic could legally train its models on lawfully purchased books, but that it could still face liability for piracy, resulting in a settlement with authors worth roughly £1.1 billion.
Licensing Deals Reshape the Landscape
Alongside the litigation, dozens of media outlets have signed licensing deals with OpenAI, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Vox Media. In 2025, The New York Times entered a licensing agreement with Amazon, permitting its editorial content, including news articles and recipes, to appear within Amazon’s generative AI tools.
“The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case,” the US attorneys wrote. “But it would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing. LLM training is ‘consistent with that creative “progress” that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself.'”
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