The Trump administration supported OpenAI in a lawsuit against the New York Times, which accuses the creator of ChatGPT of violating copyright by using its content to train artificial intelligence models. The U.S. government filed an official 20-page document with the federal court in New York, signed by Deputy Attorney General Stanley Woodward, invoking issues of "scientific progress," economic growth, and "national security" to justify its position in favor of the AI company.
In the filing, the United States argues that it has a "paramount interest" in the court rejecting any argument that training large language models on protected texts would violate copyright. Stanley Woodward emphasized that Trump considered AI dominance as crucial to national security and that the administration would never allow the United States to be at a disadvantage against foreign adversaries due to a copyright interpretation.
New York Times spokesperson Graham James criticized the government's position, accusing the Trump administration of siding with "million-dollar companies" at the expense of creators. According to James, this position would compromise the sustainability of human-created content, on which a healthy society depends and which AI itself needs to function.
The litigation between the New York Times and OpenAI dates back to December 2023, when the newspaper sued the company and Microsoft, estimating damages at "several billion dollars." The U.S. Department of Justice considers that the concept of "fair use" applies to AI model training, arguing that the newspaper's restrictive interpretation would constitute an obstacle to competition.
