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September 6, 2026
Trump’s DOJ Takes OpenAI’s Side Against the Times
The Trump administration sees broad latitude for AI training as essential to innovation, economic growth and U.S. leadership, while The New York Times argues that protecting the work of journalists is also necessary for both a healthy information system and responsible AI.
The fight began in December 2023, when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they had used millions of its articles without permission to train AI systems and seeking billions of dollars in damages.1 The publishers’ core complaint is not simply that their work was copied, but that AI products now compete with the reporting that helped build them.
As the case moved toward a potentially decisive ruling, the dispute narrowed to copyright’s fair-use test: did the companies transform the articles into something new, or create a substitute that drains their value? In final summary-judgment filings, the Times argued that its work was neither sufficiently transformed nor protected by fair use. “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,” it told the court.2
Then the Trump administration entered the fray. In a statement of interest filed this week, the Justice Department backed OpenAI’s position that training large language models on copyrighted text can be fair use. Government lawyers warned that the Times’ proposed reading would “severely hamper ‘the Progress of Science and useful Arts,’” arguing that restricting LLM development would impede scientific advances, prosperity and economic mobility.3
The department cast the matter in still larger terms: AI development is critical to national security, it said, and the technology’s benefits “far outweigh any competitive harm.” A Justice Department official called the intervention a “historic statement of interest,” while a Times spokesman said the government was choosing a handful of “trillion-dollar A.I. companies” over American creators.4
The filing does not decide the case; Judge Sidney H. Stein will rule in the coming weeks on whether it proceeds to trial. But it gives OpenAI a powerful new ally in a lawsuit that could shape whether the companies that train on the internet must compensate the people and publishers who made it.