The Trump Administration has sided with OpenAI in the artificial intelligence firm's legal fight with the New York Times, according to a report published by WIRED on Tuesday. The federal government submitted a letter to the court arguing that OpenAI's use of copyrighted news articles to train its AI systems falls within legal bounds under fair use doctrine. The media company launched its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming the tech giants broke copyright law by using its journalism to develop AI tools without authorization.

The government's filing stated that the United States holds a "strong interest" in determining whether AI training on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use, linking this question directly to whether America's AI sector can "retain global leadership in artificial intelligence." Federal lawyers contended that the Times' interpretation of fair use clashes with existing copyright law and warned that a victory for the newspaper would bring catastrophic results. "Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility," the government's attorneys wrote. The administration characterized training large language models on copyrighted content as "extraordinarily transformative," asserting that these systems substantially alter their source material. The filing also maintained that OpenAI's language models don't meaningfully rival the Times' articles in the marketplace.

According to Evan Brown, an intellectual property attorney with Neal & McDevitt, the US district judge handling this matter, Sidney H. Stein, isn't required to allow the letter to shape his final ruling. However, Brown noted that Stein and other judges presiding over similar disputes will almost certainly "take it quite seriously because it comes from the Department of Justice, and inherently carries a lot of weight." Pamela Samuelson, a copyright attorney who co-leads the Berkeley Center For Law & Technology, characterized the government's brief as a "significant development" that aligns with AI copyright decisions issued to date. The Times pushed back strongly through spokesperson Graham James, who stated: "The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole."

The administration's argument draws a parallel between AI training and how human writers develop their skills—comparing it to how a teenage Joan Didion typed out Ernest Hemingway's stories to learn the craft of writing. The letter warned that conflating AI training with what AI tools generate would create "problematic implications for copyright law generally" by suggesting it would be equally unlawful for human authors to hone their abilities by studying others' work. While the government's position focuses on the Times and OpenAI specifically, officials noted their reasoning extends to all participants in this case and related litigation, including additional publishers and writers. Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Author's Guild—which launched its own legal action against OpenAI in 2023—told WIRED her organization feels "extremely disappointed" by the letter, calling it "replete with faulty arguments and a gross misunderstanding of the fair use doctrine and copyright law."

Dozens of prominent lawsuits are currently moving through courts over whether AI companies can legally train their systems on copyrighted work. The two largest rulings so far came last year, with Meta technically prevailing in its copyright case, Kadrey v. Meta, though the judge observed that plaintiffs hadn't supplied sufficient evidence that the training harmed them while emphasizing that under different circumstances, training on copyrighted materials without permission might indeed break the law. The government's intervention signals that federal authorities view the outcome of these disputes as critical to America's competitive position in the global AI race. For creators and media organizations, the legal landscape remains uncertain—but the administration has now made clear which side it believes serves the national interest.