US backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit

The US government has sided with OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit brought by the New York Times, defending the use of copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence models in a court document filed on September 1.

The New York Times sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, alleging that the companies used millions of Times articles to train powerful AI models without permission.

The Justice Department said in a 20-page document that the “creative possibilities and public benefits” advanced by large language model training outweighed any competitive harm. It argued that restricting such training under what it called a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would hinder creative and scientific progress.

The department also argued that the Times’ interpretation of the law would create an anti-competitive barrier that would function largely as subsidies for established mainstream media companies.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward wrote on X on September 2 that President Donald Trump had made clear that “AI dominance is critical” to national security, prosperity and economic mobility.

The Times’ lawsuit partly turns on the fair use exception, which can allow copyrighted work to be used without the rights holder’s consent. The Justice Department argued that AI model training on written works is “exceedingly transformative” and can benefit from that exception.

Graham James, a New York Times spokesman, told US media that the Justice Department was siding with “trillion-dollar AI companies” at the expense of American creators. He said allowing companies to use content without permission or compensation would undermine human-created content that society and AI systems depend on.

Copyright has become a major battleground for generative AI companies and creators. In July, a US judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and several authors, while ruling that Anthropic’s use of books to train its Claude AI model was transformative enough to qualify as fair use but that other uses of pirated materials were not. In May, several publishers sued Meta in New York over alleged theft of copyrighted content.