The Trump administration filed a 20-page legal brief in September 2026 defending OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material to train its large language models (LLMs), siding with the company in an ongoing lawsuit brought by The New York Times.
The brief argues that restricting AI development through copyright law would harm U.S. competitiveness. “The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally,” the document states, citing an executive order President Donald Trump signed previously. It further warns that “constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”
The case, being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, centers on whether AI companies can legally train models on copyrighted books, articles, and other published works without permission. LLMs powering chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built on massive datasets that include such material. The core legal question involves fair use — specifically, whether AI training constitutes a sufficiently “transformative” use of copyrighted works to be considered lawful.
The administration’s brief is not a court ruling and its authors have no jurisdiction over the case. However, it may still carry influence with the presiding court.
Prior rulings have generally favored AI companies on training-related copyright claims. In a related case, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to a group of writers, but the fine was tied to Anthropic’s use of pirated “shadow libraries” — not to AI training itself. Alsup compared an LLM’s training process to a human reading a book in order to develop their own writing.
Source: TechCrunch