The Trump administration filed a 20-page brief defending OpenAI’s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs in the lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI. That’s the state stepping in on the side of a company accused of feeding other people’s work into its machines without permission, then asking the courts to bless the whole arrangement as progress.
Who Gets the Power
The brief says 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. It also says it is critical for the United States to retain global leadership in artificial intelligence. The language is polished, but the message is plain: keep the machine running, keep the market winning, keep the country on top.
The brief argues that constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility. That’s the official pitch. The people whose books, articles and other media get scraped into massive databases don’t appear in that promise except as raw material.
The case centers on whether AI companies can use copyrighted material to train large language models without permission. The reporting says the LLMs powering chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are trained on massive databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles and other media that AI companies feed into those databases without permission. Many publishers, including The New York Times in this case, have argued that it is illegal for AI companies like OpenAI to train AI models on their copyrighted material. The fight is over who gets to control the labor and output of writers, publishers and other creators once it’s been turned into fuel for corporate systems.
Who Pays for the System
The fair use debate in the case turns on whether AI companies’ use of copyrighted work is transformative enough for a judge to rule it legal. That legal language matters because it decides whether the people at the bottom get paid, or whether their work gets absorbed into a platform economy that treats permission as an inconvenience.
The brief references an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year. It is not a ruling, and the authors of the brief do not have jurisdiction because the case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, but the intervention could still carry weight. Even without jurisdiction, the federal government can still lean on the scales. That’s how power works when it wants to look neutral.
The reporting says cases about AI training and copyright infringement have largely been favorable to AI companies so far. 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, but Anthropic was not punished for its AI training. Instead, the company was fined for using illegal shadow libraries to pirate the books it used for training. The punishment landed on the method, not the underlying theft of labor. The system found a way to call that accountability.
What They Call Fair Use
Alsup wrote, "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."
That line does a lot of work for the companies that want access without consent. It dresses extraction up as creativity, and it asks the public to accept that a machine built on copied work somehow stands apart from the people whose work made it possible.
The New York Times lawsuit keeps that contradiction in the open. On one side, publishers say the use is illegal. On the other, the Trump administration says the country needs this industry to stay competitive and prosperous. In between sit the writers, readers and creators whose work gets turned into training data first and debated later. The apparatus moves fast when it wants permission for itself.