OpenAI Gains Support from the Trump Administration in NYT Copyright Case
The Trump administration has stepped into the copyright lawsuit involving OpenAI and The New York Times, backing the AI lab’s position.
This significant lawsuit, initiated in December 2023, claims that OpenAI improperly trained its AI systems using articles from The New York Times and is seeking to recover “billions of dollars” in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. Recently, the Trump administration submitted a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI’s stance that using copyrighted text for AI training falls under fair use.
US attorneys stated, “The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs). That result would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts.’” They further emphasized that “LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs” and warned that limiting LLM development due to a misunderstanding of fair use would hinder creative and scientific advancements, as well as American economic growth.
The Trump administration has frequently utilized statements of interest in private litigation, which officials have described as “incredibly” effective in promoting its policy goals. They have previously argued that AI training should be considered fair use, as outlined in their National AI Legislative Framework. Additionally, Trump has a personal grievance against The New York Times, as he is currently pursuing a defamation lawsuit against the publication.
The outcome of this case could set a precedent for other media organizations that are frustrated with AI systems using their content for training. Tensions over copyright issues between media outlets and AI labs have escalated in recent years, with lawsuits from various organizations, including the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Chicago Tribune. A landmark ruling in 2025 determined that Anthropic could legally train its models on books it had lawfully purchased, but it could still face liability for piracy, leading to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors.
Meanwhile, numerous media outlets have established licensing agreements with OpenAI, including The Associated Press and Vox Media. In 2025, The New York Times struck a licensing deal with Amazon, allowing its editorial content, such as news articles and recipes, to be featured in Amazon’s generative AI tools.
The US attorneys concluded, “The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case. But it would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing. LLM training is ‘consistent with that creative ‘progress’ that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself.’”
