The Trump administration submitted a 20-page legal brief supporting OpenAI’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train large language models, in a lawsuit filed by the New York Times.
Government stance
The brief argues that the United States has a strong interest in developing a competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the global standard for AI use. It states that it is critical for the nation to retain global leadership in the field, referencing an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year.
Large language models powering services like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on massive databases of published works. These databases include copyrighted books, articles, and other media that AI companies feed into systems without permission. Many publishers, including the New York Times, argue it is illegal for companies like OpenAI to train models on their material.
The legal argument
The question of whether copyrighted material can be used to train an AI is not straightforward, leading to extensive legal debate. The discussions often centre on fair use, a copyright law exception that allows the use of someone else’s work without permission in certain scenarios. In this case, the debate addresses whether AI companies’ use of copyrighted work is “transformative” enough for a judge to rule it legal.
The brief states that constraining large language model development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.
Recent court outcomes
Cases regarding AI training and copyright infringement have largely been favourable to 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.
Anthropic was not penalised for its AI training methods. Instead, the company was fined for using illegal shadow libraries to pirate the books it used 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. He compared the large language model’s training process to a human reading a book.
What this brief means
This new Trump administration brief is not a ruling, as the case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The authors of the brief do not have jurisdiction over the case. However, this intervention by the Trump administration could still carry weight in the legal proceedings.
