In a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, the Trump administration has stepped in with a 20-page brief defending the ChatGPT maker's use of copyrighted material without permission to train its large language models. "The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally… As such, it is critical for the United States to 'retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,'" the brief states, citing an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last year.

The LLMs that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built on vast troves of published works—copyrighted books, articles, and other media—that AI companies feed into their systems without authorization. Publishers, including The New York Times in this instance, have argued that it is unlawful for AI firms like OpenAI to train their models on such material. Whether copyrighted content can legally be used for AI training is far from clear-cut, which is why the issue has sparked extensive legal debate. Much of this conversation centers on fair use, a provision in copyright law that permits certain uses of protected work without permission under specific conditions. Here, the fair use question hinges on whether AI companies' employment of copyrighted material is "transformative" enough for a judge to deem it lawful.

"Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility," the brief argues. So far, court rulings on AI training and copyright infringement have largely leaned in favor of AI companies. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to a group of writers whose works were used to train the company's AI models—but Anthropic wasn't penalized for the training itself. Instead, the fine stemmed from the company's use of illegal shadow libraries to pirate the books it relied on for training. "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them—but to turn a hard corner and create something different," Judge Alsup wrote, likening the AI's learning process to a human reading a book.

This latest brief from the Trump administration is not a ruling, as the case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and its authors hold no jurisdiction over the proceedings. Nevertheless, this intervention from the administration could still carry significant influence.