The filing
The Trump administration has entered the New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI by filing a statement of interest. The document supports OpenAI’s position that using published articles to train large language models counts as fair use under copyright law. It directly opposes any effort to limit the doctrine in ways that would block such training.
The letter was submitted this week and aligns with arguments OpenAI has already made in the case. It does not introduce new evidence or data. Instead it endorses the view that training AI systems on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use when the output does not substitute for the original works.
Background of the dispute
The New York Times filed its complaint in December 2023. The suit alleges that OpenAI trained its models on the newspaper’s articles without permission. It names both OpenAI and Microsoft as defendants and seeks billions of dollars in damages. The case has become a test of how copyright law treats the large-scale ingestion of text for model development.
Before the government filing, the central disagreement concerned whether feeding full articles into training pipelines meets the fair-use standard. OpenAI has maintained that the process creates a new system rather than a replacement for the source material. The New York Times has argued that the use is commercial and that the resulting models compete with its own content.
Content of the government letter
The administration’s statement repeats the claim that the New York Times is attempting to narrow fair-use doctrine so that it excludes the training of large language models. The filing addresses both the fair-use question and the broad scope of damages requested in the complaint. It was submitted on the same day in early September 2026 according to reports from both The Verge and Wired.
No trial date or additional procedural steps appear in the available material. The intervention places the executive branch’s position on the record but leaves the underlying claims for the court to decide. Both outlets note that the letter stops short of resolving any factual disputes between the parties.
Reactions and remaining questions
Neither source reports statements from the New York Times or from OpenAI in direct response to the filing. The letter simply adds one more voice to an ongoing legal debate. It does not alter the fact that the case remains active and that a judge will ultimately rule on the fair-use defense.
The absence of new data in the filing means the core factual questions—how much of each article was used, how the models store or regurgitate text, and what licensing arrangements existed—stay unresolved. The government’s position therefore functions as an interpretive signal rather than a factual contribution.
Why it matters
The filing gives companies developing large language models an explicit statement from the current administration that training on publicly available text can fall within fair use. Engineering teams that maintain data pipelines built on web crawls now have an additional reference point when assessing legal risk. At the same time, the document does not create new law; it only records one branch of government’s preferred reading of existing doctrine.
For news organizations, the development leaves licensing deals and technical protections as the main practical tools for controlling reuse of their archives. The case itself continues, so any final boundary on training data will still come from judicial rulings rather than this letter. The practical effect for product teams is therefore a modest reduction in uncertainty around data practices that rely on published material, while rights holders retain the ability to press their claims through the courts.
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Sources:
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