The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the

What happened

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup “billions of dollars” in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI.

At the same time, dozens of media outlets have inked licensing deals with OpenAI, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Vox Media. In 2025, The New York Times entered into a licensing deal with Amazon allowing its editorial content, including news articles and recipes, to appear in Amazon’s generative AI tools.

Why it matters

This week, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI’s argument that it’s fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text. “The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAl’s large language models (LLMs),” US attorneys wrote in the statement.

” The Trump administration has leaned heavily on statements of interest in private litigation, which one official has called “incredibly” successful at advancing its policy aims. It’s argued previously that AI training should count as fair use, making the case in its National AI Legislative Framework. Trump also holds a personal animus toward the Times, against which he is currently pursuing a defamation suit.

The Times case could set precedent for other media outlets frustrated over AI systems training on their work. Copyright disagreements between media outlets and AI labs have intensified in recent years, including lawsuits from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago Tribune, and New York Daily News. 5 billion settlement with authors.

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“The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case,” the US attorneys wrote in the statement. “But it would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of Al models impermissible without licensing.

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