Trump Administration Sides With OpenAI in New York

What happened

The Trump Administration just took OpenAI’s side in the artificial intelligence company’s legal battle with the New York Times. The media juggernaut sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that the companies had violated copyright law by training their AI tools on its articles without permission. Now, the government has stepped in, arguing that OpenAI’s actions were within bounds.

“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” New York Times spokesperson Graham James tells WIRED. ” OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Other plaintiffs are unhappy at the government’s incursion.

” There are dozens of ongoing, high-profile lawsuits over the legality of AI companies training their tools on copyrighted work. The two biggest decisions so far took place last year. Meta technically won its copyright case, Kadrey v.

Meta, although the judge noted that the plaintiffs did not produce enough evidence that the training caused them harm while stressing that in other circumstances, training on copyrighted materials without permission might indeed be illegal. 5 billion in damages, the largest copyright settlement in national history.

The judge in that case carved out an important caveat, ruling that the AI training itself was fair use, but that the authors were owed damages because the AI giant had pirated their books. Meanwhile, the larger fight over copyright rages on.

Why it matters

While the letter focuses on the New York Times and OpenAI, the government noted that its arguments apply to all of the parties in this case and related cases, including other publishers and authors. Training LLMs on copyrighted works is considered “extraordinarily transformative,” meaning that these systems meaningfully change their inputs, the administration argued.

The administration also wrote that OpenAI’s LLMs do not significantly compete with The New York Times’ articles. Courts consider both of these conditions, as well as others, when deciding if the fair use doctrine is met.

Conflating AI training with what artificial intelligence tools produce would lead to “problematic implications for copyright law generally” by implying that it would be similarly illegal for human writers to practice their craft by training on the words of others, per the letter. ) Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer with the firm Neal & McDevitt, tells WIRED that the US district judge overseeing this case, Sidney H.

Stein, is not obliged to let this letter influence his ultimate decision. ” Pamela Samuelson, a copyright lawyer who codirects the Berkeley Center For Law & Technology, tells WIRED that the government’s brief is a “significant development,” and one which is consistent with AI copyright rulings thus far.

What to watch

New lawsuits are still rolling in; late last week, Sony and Warner Music sued Anthropic, following another suit from other music giants like Universal Music Group, in which Anthropic is mounting a fair use defense. In both cases, the companies allege that their copyrighted material was stolen to train Claude, the company’s popular AI tool.