The Trump administration has formally weighed in on The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s not siding with the newspaper. In a statement of interest filed this week, US attorneys argued that training large language models on copyrighted text should qualify as fair use — and that ruling otherwise would damage American competitiveness in AI.
The Justice Department’s filing directly targets the Times’ core legal theory. “The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models,” the attorneys wrote, adding that such a result would “severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts.’” The administration’s position mirrors what it laid out in its National AI Legislative Framework, which already staked out the claim that AI training constitutes fair use. There’s also a personal dimension here: Trump is currently pursuing a defamation suit against the Times, a fact that’s hard to separate from the timing of this intervention.
The stakes extend well beyond one newspaper. The Times filed its landmark suit in December 2023, seeking billions in damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft. Other outlets — the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News — have filed similar claims. A 2025 ruling against Anthropic showed the complexity here: a judge found training on lawfully purchased books was legal, but the company still paid $1.5 billion to settle piracy claims with authors.
Meanwhile, the media landscape is splitting two ways. Dozens of publishers, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Vox Media, have signed licensing deals with OpenAI. Ironically, the Times itself struck a deal with Amazon in 2025 allowing its content to appear in Amazon’s generative AI tools. The administration’s filing acknowledges that fair use “hinges on the specific facts” of each case, but warns against “broad copyright liability” that would require licensing for all AI training. That’s the real question here: whether courts will treat AI training as transformative use or as industrial-scale copying. The answer will shape whether news organizations get paid for their archives — or watch them get absorbed into models for free.
