Trump administration files in support of OpenAI's fair-use defence in the Times case
The statement of interest argues that making unlicensed training impermissible would be legally incorrect, then concedes that fair use turns on the facts of each use. For teams pricing a content licence, the concession is the operative half.
The Product Desk
What happened
- The Trump administration filed a statement of interest this week in The New York Times' copyright case, backing OpenAI's position that training a large language model on copyrighted text is fair use.
- The suit, filed in December 2023, alleges OpenAI trained unlawfully on Times articles and seeks billions of dollars in damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft.
- US attorneys wrote that excluding LLM training from fair use would be inconsistent with basic copyright principles and would severely hamper 'the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'
- The same filing states that the fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case, while calling broad liability for unlicensed training legally incorrect.
Why it matters
- Who has to decide decision Anyone about to sign a defensive content licence is now negotiating against a federal filing that says liability by default for unlicensed training is wrong in law, which trims the publisher's leverage without changing what the licence itself is good for.
- What it limits constraint Because the government tied fair use to the facts of each use, the filing cannot be used to close out a provenance question in a vendor review; that answer still has to be an invoice or a contract.
- What it sets up precedent With an official describing the tactic as 'incredibly' successful, publishers with live AI suits can reasonably expect the United States to turn up on the doctrinal side of the labs in their dockets as well.
- Who's exposed exposure The Times case is the reference point for the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News claims, so those plaintiffs inherit whatever fair-use reading emerges here.
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SPUR's 80-plus publishers can count AI use of their news only where AI firms agree to report itConfirmed3 publishers
The row in a legal review that says "training data provenance" does not get easier to fill in this week. Liability in these cases has been landing on how a corpus was obtained rather than on the act of training. A 2025 decision found that Anthropic could lawfully train on books it had purchased while remaining exposed on piracy [5], and the piracy exposure is what produced a $1.5 billion settlement with authors [6]. Nothing in the government's filing disturbs that split, and the filing effectively says so when it puts the inquiry on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case [11].
Teams often assume a content licence buys cover for whatever went into the model. What it actually buys is narrower: a dated document naming a scope and a counterparty who cannot later claim surprise. Those are two different products at two different prices. Only the second one survives contact with a discovery request.
Watch the plaintiff as an operator rather than as a victim. The Times is suing OpenAI over training [2] while licensing its articles and recipes to Amazon for use in Amazon's generative AI tools [13]. For that publisher, litigation and licensing are running at the same time rather than as a choice between them [14]. Dozens of outlets have signed with OpenAI, including the Associated Press and Vox Media [12]. The licence market did not wait for the doctrine, and it will not close because of one brief.
On how much weight the brief carries: the administration has used statements of interest heavily in private litigation, and one official described them as "incredibly" successful at advancing policy aims [7]. It had already argued that AI training should count as fair use in its National AI Legislative Framework [8], and Trump is separately pursuing a defamation suit against the Times [9]. Taken together, the filing looks like a policy position that happened to find a convenient docket, not a finding about these particular facts.
So draw the two axes the rulings actually turn on. One: can you produce a transaction for every copy in your training or retrieval corpus? Two: does the output substitute for the source it learned from? The argument filed this week helps in exactly one quadrant, lawful acquisition paired with non-substituting output. The Anthropic number prices the quadrant directly below it. Everything on the substitution side is still an evidence fight about your specific product, which is what the filing's own carve-out says [11].
The forcing question for each model, dataset and scraper in your stack is which document proves acquisition. Where there is no document, the fair-use argument the government made is not one you can borrow, and a licence bought now is buying a paper trail rather than a legal opinion. The deck usually claims more than that. What holds up on Friday is smaller.
What to watch
- Whether the judge in the Times case engages with the statement of interest or sets it aside when reaching fair use.
- Whether the same statement-of-interest tactic shows up in the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago Tribune or New York Daily News suits.
- Whether licensing terms offered to publishers get tighter now that the government has argued licensing should not be a precondition for training.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence72
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives72
- Confidence66
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers- Builder
- Builder 25%
- Operator
- Operator 38%
- Investor
- Investor 37%
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
This week the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit, supporting OpenAI's argument that it is fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text.
- [2]
The lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleges that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup billions of dollars in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI.
- [3]
US attorneys wrote that the Times 'seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI's large language models (LLMs)' and that such a result 'would be inconsistent with basic copyright law principles and severely hamper the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'
- [4]
The filing said 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.'
- [5]
In a milestone 2025 decision, a judge found that Anthropic could legally train its models on lawfully purchased books, but that it could still be held liable for piracy.
- [6]
That case resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement with authors.
- [7]
The Trump administration has leaned heavily on statements of interest in private litigation, which one official has called 'incredibly' successful at advancing its policy aims.
- [8]
The administration had previously argued that AI training should count as fair use, making the case in its National AI Legislative Framework.
- [9]
Trump holds a personal animus toward the Times, against which he is currently pursuing a defamation suit.
- [10]
The Times case could set precedent for other media outlets frustrated over AI training, including lawsuits from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News.
- [11]
The filing states that 'the fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case,' while calling it problematic and legally incorrect to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing.
- [12]
Dozens of media outlets have signed licensing deals with OpenAI, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Vox Media.
- [13]
In 2025 The New York Times entered a licensing deal with Amazon allowing its editorial content, including news articles and recipes, to appear in Amazon's generative AI tools.
- [14]
The New York Times is pursuing copyright litigation over AI training against OpenAI at the same time as it licenses its content to Amazon for generative AI tools, so for that publisher suing and licensing are running in parallel rather than as alternatives.
Sources
3 independent publishers whose own reporting we read for this story.
- gizmodo.comTrump Admin Teams Up With OpenAI in Its Fight Against the New York Times
1 article · September 2, 2026
- theverge.comThe Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit
1 article · September 2, 2026
- wired.comTrump Administration Sides With OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Lawsuit
2 articles · September 2, 2026
Topics and entities
Topics
- Copyright and AI training data
- AI Content Licensing
- Fair Use Doctrine