US Justice Department backs AI-training fair use in the New York Times case

The US Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the consolidated copyright litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York, urging the court to hold that training large language models on copyrighted written works is fair use. The 20-page brief argued that training is “exceedingly transformative” — that the copies made during training teach a model statistical relationships between words rather than to reproduce the works — and warned that a contrary ruling would “thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity” and weaken US competitiveness and national security.

It was the first time the federal government had taken a substantive position on the AI-training fair-use question inside active litigation. A statement of interest, filed under 28 U.S.C. §517, carries no binding authority; Judge Sidney Stein will decide the question independently, and both sides had filed cross-motions for summary judgment asking him to resolve fair use before any jury trial. The DOJ said its reasoning extended to the related author and publisher cases folded into the same multidistrict proceeding.

The New York Times objected sharply the next day, saying the administration was siding with a small number of very large AI companies at the expense of American creators whose work had been used without permission. The intervention marked a new phase in the copyright suit the Times filed in 2023 — the central test of whether commercial model training on copyrighted text is transformative fair use — placing the executive branch’s weight behind the developers’ position while the courts, and increasingly Congress, weighed the same question.