The Trump administration submitted a 20-page brief in the lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, defending the company’s training of its artificial intelligence models using copyrighted content without permission. According to a report dated September 2, 2026, the administration stated that maintaining a strong and competitive artificial intelligence sector in the U.S. and preserving its global leadership were critical.
Large language models that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are trained on vast databases that also contain copyrighted books, articles and other media content. Many publishers, including The New York Times, argue that this use is unlawful. At the center of the debate is the “fair use” exception in copyright law and whether artificial intelligence companies use works in a sufficiently “transformative” manner. The government argued that misinterpreting fair use and restricting model development efforts would hinder creative and scientific progress.
Rulings in artificial intelligence training and copyright lawsuits have so far largely favored the companies. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion settlement over its use of authors’ works; however, the penalty was linked not directly to the training process but to illegal shadow libraries from which the books were obtained. Alsup likened the models’ learning to produce something different rather than copy works to a person reading books.
The government’s brief is not a ruling; the case is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and those who prepared the brief have no jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the intervention is said to have the potential to affect the case.
Why it matters
The view shows that the legal boundaries surrounding the use of copyrighted works to train AI models are not merely a dispute between the parties but are also connected to U.S. AI policy. This approach highlights the tension between lawsuits filed by publishers over the unauthorized use of their content and the demand that model development activities not be restricted. For those following the case, the central unresolved question is whether the model’s training process or the manner in which the works were obtained will be decisive in the fair-use analysis. The previous ruling indicates that these two stages can be separated; however, the government’s position is not binding on the court. For this reason, the filing sets out a position that could affect the framework of the debate in the case rather than establishing the legal outcome with certainty.
Background
OpenAI is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 10 news articles mentioning the name in the last 90 days; the most recent is dated September 2, 2026.