Trump admin backs OpenAI in NYT copyright fight — SkimNews
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- Trump administration filed a 20-page amicus brief in The New York Times v. OpenAI, arguing that restricting LLMs under fair use doctrine would "thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity"
- The brief invokes a 2024 Trump executive order declaring it "critical" for the US to "retain global leadership in artificial intelligence," framing AI training as a matter of national competitive interest
- The New York Times is suing OpenAI over the unlicensed use of copyrighted articles, books, and other media to train ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and similar chatbots
- Judge William Alsup last year ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion for using illegal "shadow libraries," but ruled the AI training itself was fair use, comparing LLMs to a human reader studying books "to turn a hard corner and create something different"
- The Trump brief carries no legal weight as a ruling—the case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the brief's authors lack jurisdiction—but the source notes the intervention itself "could still carry weight"
Why it matters: The federal government formally intervening against a major publisher in a high-stakes AI copyright fight reframes the debate as national industrial policy, not just private litigation. If courts absorb the same "transformative use" reasoning that let Anthropic off the hook for training (though not for piracy), NYT's case—and similar suits from authors and newsrooms—becomes much harder to win.
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