A massive win for OpenAI (and for AI training in general) for its legal case against New York Times.

The U.S. govt just formally backed OpenAI’s claim that copyrighted-text training is fair use, partly on national-security grounds.

This is Washington’s first formal intervention in the wider wave of copyright lawsuits over AI training, though the filing is advisory rather than binding on the court.

The U.S. Dept of Justice filed a statement of interest of the US formally arguing in the OpenAI copyright litigation that training LLMs on copyrighted texts should generally qualify as fair use;

That distinction still leaves separate copyright questions around how training data was acquired and whether particular outputs reproduce protected passages.
The Justice dept separated acquiring material, training on it, and generating outputs, then focuses its argument specifically on copying at the training stage.

It argues that training serves a different purpose from publishing an article because an LLM uses text to learn statistical relationships and generate new responses.

For market harm, DOJ says training itself does not substitute for the original work, so later AI-generated competition should not automatically make the earlier training unlawful.

The administration also warns that blanket licensing requirements could raise barriers for smaller AI companies and put U.S. developers at a disadvantage against foreign competitors.

The court must still decide fair use case by case, but adopting DOJ’s framework would shift much of the legal pressure from model training toward data acquisition and specific outputs.