The Trump administration has filed a 20-page brief siding with OpenAI in its ongoing legal battle against The New York Times. That’s not just a procedural footnote. It’s a signal about how the U.S. government intends to treat AI training data policy going forward, and it matters well beyond this single lawsuit.
As TechCrunch reported, the brief argues that restricting how AI companies use copyrighted material during model training would damage American competitiveness. “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 reads. It also cites an executive order Trump signed last year, framing AI leadership as a national priority.
The core legal question here is whether training a large language model on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. That doctrine allows limited use of protected works without permission under certain conditions, one of which is whether the new use is sufficiently “transformative.” AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, have built their models on enormous datasets that include books, articles, and other published content. Rights holders argue that’s infringement. AI companies argue transformation. Courts are still sorting out who’s right.
So far, the legal record has mostly favored the AI side. The Anthropic case is a useful reference point. Judge William Alsup ordered the company to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to a group of writers, but not because of AI training itself. Anthropic was penalized for using pirated books sourced through illegal shadow libraries. The actual training process was compared by Alsup to a human reading a book to become a better writer. That framing is now shaping how courts think about these cases.
The Trump administration’s brief isn’t a ruling. The case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the authors of the brief have no jurisdiction there. But amicus filings from the federal government carry real weight. Judges pay attention when Washington signals a preferred interpretation of law, especially on a question this consequential.
For developers and founders building on top of foundation models, this matters because the legal basis for how those models were trained remains unresolved. A ruling against OpenAI wouldn’t just affect this case. It could force the entire industry to rethink how training data is sourced and licensed. The government’s intervention suggests that outcome is something Washington actively wants to prevent.
