The Trump administration has thrown its support behind OpenAI in a closely watched copyright dispute, submitting a 20-page brief that defends the company’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its large language models. The intervention comes in the lawsuit filed by The New York Times against the ChatGPT maker.
According to the brief, “The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally.” The document argues that it is critical for the country to “retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,” referencing an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year.
Why the Fair Use Debate Matters
The models powering chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on enormous databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media. AI companies feed this material into their systems without securing permission. Publishers, including the Times in this case, contend that training AI models on their copyrighted work is illegal.
The core question of whether copyrighted material can legally be used to train an AI model remains unsettled, fueling extensive legal debate. Much of that discussion centers on fair use, a provision in copyright law that permits the use of someone’s protected work without permission in certain circumstances. In this dispute, the argument turns on whether AI training is “transformative” enough to be ruled legal.
The brief warns that “constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”
How Courts Have Ruled So Far
To date, copyright cases involving AI training have largely favored the companies building the technology. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a EUR 1 billion copyright settlement to a group of writers whose works were used to train its models. However, the company was not penalized for the training itself. Instead, the fine addressed Anthropic’s use of illegal shadow libraries to pirate the books used in that process.
In his opinion, Judge Alsup compared LLM training to human learning: “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them, but to turn a hard corner and create something different.”
The Trump administration brief is not a ruling. The case is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the authors of the brief do not hold jurisdiction over the matter. Even so, the administration’s decision to intervene could carry weight as the litigation proceeds.
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