US government files brief backing OpenAI in New York Times copyright case

US government files brief supporting OpenAI against The New York Times

The Trump administration has entered the copyright lawsuit that The New York Times brought against OpenAI, submitting a 20-page brief that defends the company's use of copyrighted material to train its large language models without a license, according to TechCrunch.

The filing, reported on September 2, 2026, argues that "the United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry," and cites an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last year calling for the country to "retain global leadership in artificial intelligence."

What the brief argues

The government's argument rests heavily on the doctrine of fair use, the part of US copyright law that permits limited use of protected works without permission in certain circumstances. Courts weighing AI training disputes have focused on whether ingesting copyrighted text to build a model is "transformative" enough to qualify for that protection.

According to TechCrunch, 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."

The wider legal picture

The models behind chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are trained on enormous collections of published work, including copyrighted books and articles that AI companies have gathered without permission, TechCrunch notes. Publishers, led in this case by The New York Times, contend that this practice is illegal.

So far, US courts have mostly sided with AI companies on the training question itself. In a closely watched decision last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to a group of writers whose books were used to train its models. Crucially, though, the penalty targeted Anthropic's use of illegal "shadow libraries" to pirate those books rather than the act of training on them.

Alsup wrote that 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," comparing the training process to a human reader who studies books with the ambition of eventually writing one.

An intervention, not a ruling

The government's brief carries no direct legal authority in this dispute. The case is being heard in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the administration's lawyers have no jurisdiction, and TechCrunch emphasizes that the filing is not a ruling.

Even so, the intervention could carry weight. A federal government publicly arguing that restricting AI training would damage national competitiveness adds pressure to a case widely seen as a test case for the entire industry.

Why it matters

The Times case is one of the most significant tests yet of whether training AI models on copyrighted material counts as fair use. A ruling against OpenAI could force AI companies to license large portions of their training data, reshaping the economics of building frontier models and potentially creating a new revenue stream for publishers. A ruling in OpenAI's favor would largely validate the industry's current data practices.

The administration's brief signals that the outcome is now being treated as a matter of national economic strategy as well as copyright law. Whatever the court decides in the Southern District of New York is likely to influence a wave of similar lawsuits and could shape how models are trained, and paid for, for years to come.