Trump administration backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright battle

The Trump administration has made an extraordinary intervention in a legal battle between The New York Times and OpenAI, siding with the $852bn AI group to reject the newspaper's claims of copyright infringement.

The New York Times sued OpenAI in 2023, alleging it had taken a "free ride" by using reams of copyrighted material to build its chatbot.

The Department of Justice claimed in a filing on Wednesday that limiting the ability of OpenAI to train its models using millions of articles "would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility".

It added that the US "has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training [large language models] on copyrighted texts violates copyright law".

The intervention could prove significant in dozens of lawsuits filed by creators, publishers and copyright holders accusing AI labs of hoovering up content to train their models without permission or payment.

The legal brief cited various executive orders signed by President Donald Trump, which mandated the government to take measures to ensure American AI dominance.

The move comes just days after Trump defied many of his own voters — and Republican Party strategists — in calling for more AI data centre construction, saying opponents of such projects want to be "backwards and poor" .

The White House has also opposed efforts by Republicans across the US to strictly regulate AI, opting for light touch, voluntary oversight of the industry.

The president has frequently clashed with The New York Times, and is personally pursuing a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the newspaper, which was refiled last week. The New York Times denies wrongdoing in the case.

OpenAI has separately held discussions with the Trump administration about giving the public a roughly 5 per cent stake in the company. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman is among the largest donors to Maga Inc, the main political fundraising group supporting Trump.

"The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole," said Graham James, a spokesperson for The New York Times.

"AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires. The Administration's proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function," he added.