The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in a lawsuit against the New York Times, arguing in favor of the use of copyrighted writing to train artificial intelligence. The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023.
In a brief filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, the US government weighed in for the first time on lawsuits over the tense battle over AI and copyright. A brief has advisory rather than legal weight but could bolster tech companies as they fight the claims. Copyright owners, including authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets, have filed dozens of lawsuits over AI training against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms.
They say the companies misuse their material to train AI systems and do so without compensation. For AI chatbots to generate responses, machine learning systems are first fed billions of lines of text. The bots produce their output by statistical analysis of what the next word should be by matching a user’s query to parts of the database.
Spokespeople for the Times and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing on Wednesday. All of the pending cases will probably revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the question issued diverging rulings last year.
The government agreed with tech companies in Tuesday’s brief that AI training is “extraordinarily” transformative.
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