The Trump Administration Just Took OpenAI's Side in the New York Times Copyright Case

Key points

• The Trump administration filed a statement of interest backing OpenAI's fair-use defence in the December 2023 New York Times lawsuit.
• The Times is seeking "billions of dollars" in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its articles to train AI systems.
• A 2025 court ruling allowed Anthropic to train on legally purchased books, but a separate piracy finding produced a $1.5 billion settlement with authors.
• News organisations including the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Vox Media have signed paid licensing deals with OpenAI rather than sue.
• Whatever a judge decides here will be the closest thing to settled law that publishers and writers have had on AI training.

The federal government stepped into one of the most closely watched AI lawsuits in the country this week, filing a statement of interest, a document where the government tells a court its view of the law without becoming a party to the case. Its view: OpenAI did nothing wrong.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, claiming the companies used millions of its articles without permission to train large language models, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT. Damages sought run to "billions of dollars."

What exactly did the government argue?

Federal attorneys said the Times is trying to shrink fair use, the longstanding legal principle that allows limited copying of copyrighted material without payment when it serves a broader public good. "Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility," their filing states. In plain terms: let AI companies keep training on published text, or slow down American science.

The Trump administration has leaned on statements of interest across several cases and has argued that AI training counts as fair use in its National AI Legislative Framework. President Trump is also personally pursuing a defamation suit against the Times, a conflict that isn't connected to this case but isn't exactly background noise either.

As our 23 August story "Who owns the words that trained AI?" found, copyright law is nowhere near catching up with the technology reshaping publishing, and this filing pushes that gap wider.

What does this mean for journalists, authors, and anyone who publishes online?

A lot hangs on this. If the court sides with the Times, AI companies would likely need licences and payments before training on copyrighted text. If it sides with OpenAI, current practice continues largely unchecked.

The picture's already mixed. A judge ruled in 2025 that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, could legally train its models on books it had purchased. Anthropic still ended up in a $1.5 billion settlement because some training material had been pirated. Sony and Warner have since filed their own suit against Anthropic, as we reported on 31 August.

Meanwhile many news organisations have chosen deals over lawsuits. The Times itself struck a 2025 agreement with Amazon letting its content appear in Amazon's AI tools, even while its OpenAI case continues.

Organisation	Action taken
New York Times	Sued OpenAI (Dec 2023); licensed to Amazon (2025)
Associated Press	Signed licensing deal with OpenAI
Axel Springer	Signed licensing deal with OpenAI
Vox Media	Signed licensing deal with OpenAI
Authors (Anthropic case)	$1.5 billion settlement (2025)

The government's filing, first reported by The Verge AI, also acknowledged that fair-use questions turn on specific facts rather than blanket rules, which leaves future cases open to different outcomes.

Here's the honest read: the Times has the resources to push this all the way, and a decision here will carry real weight for every writer and publisher whose work sits in an AI training set. Don't mistake the licensing deals elsewhere for settled peace. They're hedges, not conclusions.