The US Government has thrown its support behind OpenAI in a copyright legal battle with The New York Times.
The Trump administration argued that limiting the ability of OpenAI to train its models on millions of articles “would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility”.
The Department of Justice claimed that large language models training on content falls under the ‘fair use’ provision with the US copyright law.
It argued the US “has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training [large language models] on copyrighted texts violates copyright law”.
Associate attorney-general Stanley Woodward described the intervention as “historic” and said it aligned with Donald Trump’s view that AI dominance is critical to “promote national security, prosperity and economic mobility for all Americans”.
The New York Times sued OpenAI in 2023, claiming it used the Time’s copyrighted material to build its ChatGPT without permission.
Large publishers have been locked in a battle with AI companies over how they should be compensated for chat bots that use their material as the rise of LLMs erodes publisher website traffic.
“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” New York Times spokesperson Graham James said.
“AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.
“The Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”
It is not the first time that the Trump Administration has locked horns with the New York Times.
Trump routinely describes the storied masthead as “fake news” and is pursuing a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the newspaper.
On the other side of the legal battle, OpenAI has closed ties to the Trump administration in recent times.
Chief executive Sam Altman has proposed giving the public a 5 per cent stake in the company, while co-founder Greg Brockman is one of the largest political donors to Trump.
