Trump Justice Department backs OpenAI in copyright lawsuit filed by media outlets
The Trump administration argued in court that OpenAI's use of copyrighted news articles to train AI models constitutes fair use and should not be restricted.
What happened
The Trump Justice Department filed arguments in federal court in New York supporting OpenAI in its legal battle against The Intercept, the New York Times, and other media companies. The government argued that OpenAI's use of copyrighted articles for AI training qualifies as transformative fair use and that restricting such access would hamper U.S. scientific progress and dominance in the AI race against China. The filing, signed by associate attorneys general Stanley Woodward Jr. and Brett Shumate and attorney general's senior counsel Michael Weisbuch, argued that an erroneous fair use ruling would hamper competition in the market for LLMs because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees. The Intercept originally sued OpenAI and Microsoft in February 2024 for copyright infringement; a judge dismissed claims against Microsoft in November 2024 but allowed the case against OpenAI to proceed, and the case was consolidated with other media plaintiffs including the New York Times, Tribune Media Company, and Ziff Davis under U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.
Context
The case reflects a broader tension between copyright protection for media outlets and the operational requirements of large language models, which require vast amounts of training data. The Trump administration's position prioritizes AI industry dominance as a national security and economic concern, framing the dispute as part of competition with China rather than a copyright matter. Media outlets argue this represents an uncompensated transfer of intellectual property rights to tech companies and threatens their financial survival. The filing comes after Trump signed a December 2025 executive order aimed at ensuring U.S. AI leadership across all states.
What's disputed
Whether OpenAI's data scraping constitutes fair use under copyright law; whether the Justice Department's position is based on the merits of the case or predetermined pro-AI alignment; the definition of transformative use in the context of AI training.