President Donald Trump’s administration has barged into OpenAI’s copyright fight with The New York Times, backing the AI outfit against the paper.
According to the Financial Times, the Department of Justice filed a brief siding with the $852 billion AI group in a case that could shape the future of machine learning.
The New York Times sued OpenAI in 2023, claiming the company had taken a “free ride” by using piles of copyrighted material to build its chatbot. The lawsuit is one of dozens from creators, publishers and rights holders who say AI labs have been hoovering up their work without permission or payment.
The DoJ claimed that limiting OpenAI’s ability to train models on millions of articles “would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility”. It added that the US “has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training [large language models] on copyrighted texts violates copyright law”.
The filing relied on executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, which directed government agencies to advance American AI dominance. The move follows Trump calling for more AI data centre construction and sneering that opponents of such projects want to be “backwards and poor”.
The White House has resisted Republican efforts across the US to clamp down on AI, preferring light-touch, voluntary oversight. That is nice work for AI firms, which can now wrap data scraping in the flag and call it national strategy.
Trump has repeatedly clashed with The New York Times and is personally pursuing a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the paper, refiled last week. The Times denies wrongdoing in that case.
OpenAI has separately discussed with the Trump administration giving the public a roughly five per cent stake in the company. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is among the largest donors to Maga Inc, the main political fundraising group backing Trump.
Times spokesperson Graham James said: “The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.”
“AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires. The Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function,” James added.
Associate attorney-general Stanley Woodward called the intervention “historic” and said it matched Trump’s view that “AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity and economic mobility for all Americans”.
“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 said on X.
