DOJ backs OpenAI's fair-use defense in NYT copyright case

The Justice Department told a Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday that training large language models on copyrighted text is fair use, filing a statement of interest that puts the U.S. government on OpenAI and Microsoft's side of the copyright suit The New York Times brought against them in late 2023. Wired reported the brief, which lands days before summary judgment motions are due before Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York on Friday, September 5.

"The United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law," the brief says, arguing that AI training is "extraordinarily" transformative and warning that siding with the Times would thwart "creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility." Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. called it "a historic statement of interest."

The Times's answer was blunt.

The administration "is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole," spokesperson Graham James said, adding that the government's proposal would undermine "the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function."

The case has picked up co-plaintiffs since 2023, including MediaNews Group papers such as the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, digital publisher Ziff Davis and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. It is the first time the federal government has taken a public side in the wave of copyright suits publishers and studios have brought against AI companies, and while a statement of interest is not binding on Judge Stein, it lands on his docket as he weighs the summary judgment briefs due at the end of the week.