The United States government has formally entered the fight over whether artificial intelligence companies can train their models on copyrighted material without permission, filing a brief this week that sides squarely with OpenAI in its long-running legal battle with The New York Times.

The 20-page amicus brief, submitted Tuesday to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, argues that training large language models on copyrighted text constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law. It is the clearest signal yet that the federal government intends to use its influence to shape how courts rule on one of the most consequential legal questions facing the AI industry.

"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," the government wrote in the filing, according to reporting on the document. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward went further in comments tied to the filing, stating that "AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans."

The brief argues that using copyrighted works to train an AI model makes "extraordinarily" transformative use of the underlying content, meaning the resulting product does not substitute for the original work in the marketplace — a central test under fair-use doctrine. The government also invoked President Trump's 2025 executive order on AI leadership, framing copyright restrictions on model training as a potential obstacle to maintaining American dominance in artificial intelligence development.

A years-long legal fight reaches a pivotal moment

The case dates back to December 2023, when The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close partner Microsoft in the same Manhattan federal court, alleging that the companies used millions of the newspaper's articles to train ChatGPT and Copilot without authorization or compensation. The Times' complaint alleged that the chatbots could reproduce "near-verbatim replicas" of copyrighted articles and, in some instances, generated fabricated content that was falsely attributed to the newspaper.

OpenAI has consistently argued that its training practices are protected under fair use, characterizing the technology as transformative rather than a substitute for journalism, and has accused the Times of manipulating its products to manufacture evidence for the lawsuit. In March 2025, Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected most of the defendants' motions to dismiss, allowing the core copyright infringement claims to move forward while narrowing some of the Times' Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims. The case was later consolidated with related suits brought by the New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and in June 2026 the Times amended its complaint to allege that Microsoft had actively encouraged OpenAI's unauthorized use of its content.

Spokespeople for both OpenAI and the Times reportedly declined to comment immediately on the government's filing.

Why the government's position matters beyond one lawsuit

The Times case is widely viewed as one of the most important pending disputes over generative AI and copyright, and the outcome could set precedent for dozens of similar lawsuits working through federal courts. Authors, music labels, image libraries, and other news organizations have filed comparable claims against OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and other model developers, arguing that scraping copyrighted material to train commercial AI systems without a license amounts to infringement at scale.

Courts have not spoken with one voice on the underlying question. Two federal judges who considered similar fair-use arguments in other AI training cases over the past year reached diverging conclusions, leaving the law unsettled even as the industry continues to expand. That inconsistency is part of what makes a definitive appellate ruling, or a clear signal from the federal government, so significant: it could determine whether AI companies need to license training data going forward or can continue relying on fair use as a defense.

The government's intervention also arrives against a backdrop of financial consequences already playing out elsewhere in the industry. Anthropic agreed last year to pay $1.5 billion to settle a related lawsuit from a group of authors — though that settlement centered on the company's use of pirated copies of books to build a training dataset, a distinct legal issue from whether training itself is transformative fair use. That distinction is one the DOJ's brief appears to lean on: the government is not arguing that any method of acquiring training data is lawful, but specifically that the act of training a model on lawfully-obtained copyrighted text should be treated as fair use.

The administration's advocacy for AI companies has not been limited to the courtroom. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has separately urged officials at the G20 to embrace fair-use-style principles that would allow AI systems to train on creative works, suggesting the administration is pursuing a coordinated push on both the domestic legal front and in international policy discussions.

What happens next

An amicus brief does not decide a case, and Judge Stein is not obligated to adopt the government's reasoning. But a filing from the Justice Department carries substantial weight in federal litigation, particularly on a question where the case law remains unsettled. Media companies and rights holders are likely to push back forcefully, arguing that the government is putting its thumb on the scale for a politically influential industry at the direct expense of journalism, publishing, and other content-driven businesses already grappling with AI-driven disruption to their revenue.

For OpenAI, the timing is notable: the company is simultaneously fending off scrutiny on other fronts, including safety concerns raised over its newest reasoning systems and questions about the security risk profile of its most capable models. A favorable ruling in the Times case would remove one of the largest legal overhangs facing the company and could embolden other AI developers facing similar suits to hold firm rather than negotiate licensing settlements.

The next major developments in the case are expected as both sides respond to the government's brief and the court moves toward further proceedings on the merits of the copyright claims. Given the stakes for the broader AI and media industries, the case is expected to remain one of the most closely watched pieces of technology litigation in the country.