Technology
US government backs OpenAI in copyright lawsuit over AI training
A federal legal brief argues that restricting AI training on copyrighted material under fair use would hurt American economic competitiveness.
The short version
- The Trump administration submitted a legal brief supporting OpenAI in an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit brought by The New York Times.
- The government argues that training large language models on copyrighted works without a license should be protected under fair use to maintain national leadership in AI.
- The filing is not a binding ruling, leaving the final decision on fair use to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Key facts
- The Trump administration filed a 20-page brief in the Southern District of New York backing OpenAI's unlicensed use of copyrighted content to train artificial intelligence models.[TechCrunch]
- The brief cites an executive order by President Donald Trump and argues that limiting large language model training under copyright law would hinder American scientific progress and prosperity.[TechCrunch]
- The core legal dispute in The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI centers on whether ingesting copyrighted works to train AI models is sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use.[TechCrunch]
- In a separate case, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement for obtaining books from illicit shadow libraries rather than for the underlying act of training its AI models.[TechCrunch]
What remains uncertain
- It remains unknown how much weight the federal court will assign to the executive branch's brief when ruling on the fair use defense in the lawsuit.[TechCrunch]