The US Department of Justice filed a statement of interest on September 2, 2026 backing OpenAI in its copyright fight with the New York Times, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. The filing lands nearly three years after the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, seeking billions of dollars in damages over the use of its articles to train ChatGPT and related systems. The government's position marks the most consequential federal intervention yet in the roughly two dozen AI copyright cases winding through US courts.
The DOJ letter tells Judge Sidney H. Stein that the Times' reading of fair use is 'inconsistent' with copyright law and that a plaintiff's victory would carry consequences beyond this case. Federal attorneys argue the United States has a 'strong interest' in the outcome because it bears on whether the country can 'retain global leadership in artificial intelligence.' The filing frames LLM training as 'extraordinarily transformative' and contends OpenAI's models do not meaningfully compete with the Times as a substitute for its journalism.
“Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility”— US Department of Justice, Statement of interest filing
The government also warned against conflating model training with model output. Doing so, the letter argues, would carry 'problematic implications for copyright law generally' — the equivalent, its lawyers wrote, of banning a teenage Joan Didion from typing out Ernest Hemingway's stories to learn the craft. That analogy is doing a lot of work: it collapses the distinction between a human reader internalizing text and a commercial system ingesting millions of articles at industrial scale, which is exactly the distinction the Times wants the court to draw.
Key facts
- 01The DOJ filed a statement of interest on September 2, 2026, siding with OpenAI in the New York Times copyright case originally filed in December 2023.
- 02The Times is seeking billions of dollars in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft over unauthorized training on its articles.
- 03The government argues LLM training is 'extraordinarily transformative' and does not meaningfully compete with Times articles.
- 04The filing follows Anthropic's $1.5B settlement with authors in 2025 — the largest copyright settlement in US history.
- 05Judge Sidney H. Stein is not required to follow the DOJ's position but is expected to weigh it heavily.
The Trump administration has used statements of interest aggressively across private litigation, and one official has described the tactic as 'incredibly' successful at advancing policy aims. The administration previously endorsed the fair-use framing for AI training in its National AI Legislative Framework. President Trump is also separately pursuing a defamation suit against the Times, a fact the paper's lawyers are unlikely to let the court forget.
Times spokesperson Graham James pushed back sharply, saying the administration was 'siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.' James added that 'AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.' OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at Neal & McDevitt, said Judge Stein is not obliged to defer to the DOJ but will 'take it quite seriously because it comes from the Department of Justice, and inherently carries a lot of weight.' Pamela Samuelson, who co-directs the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, called the brief a 'significant development' consistent with how AI copyright rulings have broken so far.
Other plaintiffs are not so measured. The Author's Guild, which filed its own suit against OpenAI in 2023, called the government's filing a work of 'faulty arguments' reflecting a 'gross misunderstanding' of copyright law. Author's Guild chief executive Mary Rasenberger said the group was 'extremely disappointed' by the intervention.
The case will land against a backdrop of mixed precedent. In Kadrey v. Meta, a federal judge sided with Meta on the fair-use question but noted plaintiffs had failed to prove harm, leaving the door open in future cases. In 2025, Anthropic lost its own copyright fight and agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion — the largest copyright settlement in US history. The Anthropic judge carved out a critical distinction: training on lawfully acquired books was fair use, but the company was liable because it had pirated the source material.
Fresh cases keep arriving. Sony and Warner Music sued Anthropic late last week, following an earlier suit from Universal Music Group, alleging Claude was trained on copyrighted recordings. At the same time, licensing markets are hardening: OpenAI has struck deals with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Vox Media, and in 2025 the Times itself licensed its editorial content to Amazon for use in generative AI tools — a fact that complicates the paper's public argument that AI training is categorically incompatible with its business.
If Stein adopts the DOJ's framing, the ruling would give OpenAI, Microsoft, and every other frontier lab a durable legal shield for past training runs and a green light for future ones. That would sharply reduce the leverage of publishers still holding out on licensing deals, and it would collapse the settlement value of the pending music and publisher suits. It would also make the Anthropic settlement look like an artifact of piracy rather than a template for training-data liability — which is roughly the outcome the AI industry has been quietly betting on since December 2023.
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