The fight began in December 2023, when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies had used millions of its articles without permission to train A.I. systems and seeking billions of dollars in damages. The case quickly became a test of whether feeding copyrighted work into a large language model is protected as fair use.¹

As the litigation moved toward a possible trial, the dispute narrowed around two familiar copyright questions: whether the companies transformed the Times’s reporting into something new, and whether chatbot outputs can substitute for the original journalism. The Times’s answer is emphatic: OpenAI and Microsoft copied publishers’ work and built products that now compete with the outlets that produced it. “The future not just of journalism but of responsible A.I., too, depends on preserving incentives for humans to produce the creative works on which a healthy society depends,” the paper told the court.²

Then came the federal government’s intervention. In a statement of interest filed late Tuesday, the Justice Department urged the Manhattan judge to find that OpenAI’s use of publishers’ material was lawful, arguing that A.I. development is a national-security priority and that its benefits “far outweigh any competitive harm.”³

The administration’s position is not that publishers have no stake, but that copyright law should not be interpreted in a way that hobbles model training. Government lawyers warned that excluding LLM training from fair use would be inconsistent with copyright principles and would “severely hamper” scientific and technological progress.⁴

For the Times, that framing puts public policy behind the industry it is suing. Its spokesman, Graham James, said the Justice Department was choosing a handful of “trillion-dollar A.I. companies” over American creators.³ Judge Sidney H. Stein’s coming decision on summary judgment could determine whether that trade-off becomes the legal baseline for newsrooms and A.I. developers alike.