US backs OpenAI fair use in copyright case, first of dozens

The US Justice Department filed its first brief in an AI copyright case Tuesday, arguing that training models on news articles is fair use and warning that restricting it would threaten national security.

"This is pretty reflective of the administration's pro-AI policies, which are out of step with the public skepticism of AI and out of step with our long tradition in this country of protecting human expression," said Matt Topic, the litigating attorney representing The Intercept in its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The filing, signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, backs OpenAI's fair-use defense in the lawsuit the New York Times filed in December 2023, alleging ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot trained on millions of Times articles. The government argued that AI training is "exceedingly transformative" and that narrowing fair-use doctrine would hamper competition because "only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees." The case is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta.

The brief carries advisory rather than binding weight, but it marks the first time the US government has taken a position in the wave of AI copyright litigation. The filing comes days before the parties are expected to submit motions for summary judgment after completing discovery, setting up what could be a landmark ruling on whether AI training constitutes fair use — a decision that would reshape the economics of content licensing for publishers and AI developers alike.

The government's position extends beyond the Times case. In its statement of interest, the Justice Department said "rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States therefore threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered." The filing is the latest move in the Trump administration's light-touch approach to AI regulation, which it has framed as a race against China for technological supremacy. In December 2025, Trump signed an executive order aimed at creating a federal standard to "ensure that the United States wins the AI race."

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick separately told G20 officials meeting in North Carolina on Wednesday that countries should embrace fair use and allow AI companies to train their models on creators' work while finding a way to "protect artists."

The stakes for publishers are existential. The Intercept filed its own lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in February 2024, and its case was later consolidated under US District Judge Sidney Stein alongside the Times, Tribune Media Company and Reuters. A ruling against the publishers would effectively sanction an "unprecedented, uncompensated transfer of IP rights from news organizations to tech companies," Topic said.

A New York Times spokesman pushed back on the administration's stance, saying it "is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole" and would "undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function."

The first two judges to weigh the fair-use question in AI cases issued diverging rulings last year, showing how unsettled the doctrine's application to machine learning remains. One judge found that Meta's use of copyrighted books to train its models did not qualify as fair use, while another sided with AI companies in a separate dispute.

For AI developers, the government's position could lower the cost of training by removing the threat of retroactive licensing fees, a burden that the Justice Department argued would fall hardest on smaller entrants. For publishers, the outcome determines whether they can extract licensing revenue from the companies whose models now compete with their own products — or whether their archives become free raw material for the AI industry.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.