Trump Admin Backs OpenAI in NYT Copyright Case — SkimNews
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- The Trump administration filed a 20-page amicus brief in The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI, defending the ChatGPT maker's unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs.
- The brief warns that 'constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.'
- The filing references an executive order Trump signed last year, arguing the US must 'retain global leadership in artificial intelligence' against foreign competitors.
- The case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the brief is not a ruling — the federal government has no jurisdiction in the matter, though it could still carry persuasive weight.
- Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement last year for using illegal shadow libraries to obtain training data, but found that LLM training itself wasn't infringement — comparing AI training to 'a human reading a book.'
- The fair use debate centers on whether AI companies' use of copyrighted work is 'transformative' enough to qualify as legal, with publishers arguing the practice is illegal and AI companies arguing it advances innovation.
Why it matters: The federal government's brief signals that the executive branch treats AI training on copyrighted works as fair use, which could influence ongoing litigation against OpenAI, Anthropic, and other model developers. But the $1.5 billion Anthropic ruling shows courts still punish companies for how they obtain training data (pirated shadow libraries), not for the training itself — meaning the government's position aligns with where judges have already been heading.
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