The Trump administration filed a statement of interest supporting OpenAI's fair use defense in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit over the training of ChatGPT, according to TechCrunch and ABC News.
The Justice Department argued that "the creative possibilities and public benefits" of training large language models on internet content "far outweigh any competitive harm," and that ruling against OpenAI would "thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity," TechCrunch reported. The brief cited scientific advancement, economic development and national security, and pointed to Trump's executive order on maintaining US AI leadership, ABC News reported.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train their models. MediaNews Group newspapers, Ziff Davis, the Center for Investigative Reporting and individual authors including Sarah Silverman have filed similar suits, ABC News reported.
A New York Times spokesperson, Graham James, said "both AI and creators can thrive: AI companies simply need to pay fairly," according to ABC News.
This is the first time the federal government has formally intervened on the training-data side of an AI copyright fight against a major publisher, not just filed a brief in the abstract. Any company training models on scraped text now has the Justice Department's fair use argument on the record in a live case, which is a stronger hand than a policy speech.