The United States Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, September 2, 2026, supporting OpenAI in its ongoing copyright dispute with The New York Times. This filing marks the first instance of the federal government directly intervening in the wave of copyright lawsuits targeting the artificial intelligence industry. According to the Justice Department's brief, training large language models on copyrighted material generally constitutes fair use under federal copyright law.
The brief submitted by the Justice Department asserted that the effective integration of artificial intelligence is critical for United States national security capabilities. The document warned that hindering artificial intelligence development domestically could grant foreign rivals a decisive strategic advantage. U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward stated in the filing, "This Administration will never let our Nation be at a disadvantage relative to our foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law."
Origins of the Litigation and Legal Arguments
The New York Times initially initiated legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023. According to court filings, the lawsuit alleges that the technology companies utilized millions of newspaper articles without permission to train artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT and Copilot. The complaint claims that the resulting systems sometimes reproduce long portions of copyrighted articles verbatim.
Throughout the proceedings, OpenAI has maintained that its use of copyrighted works for training is protected under the doctrine of fair use because the training process transforms the underlying material. In the proceedings before the court, Judge Sidney H. Stein largely denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss on April 4, 2025, allowing the core copyright claims to proceed to further litigation. The New York Times lawsuit has since been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation framework alongside similar suits filed by other news organizations.
The exact monetary damages sought by The New York Times in its lawsuit are not explicitly detailed in the public records regarding the Justice Department's brief.
Opposing Perspectives from Media Organizations
The New York Times and other participating media groups have contested the government's intervention, arguing that the official stance threatens creators' rights and fair compensation. According to public court filings from the publisher, artificial intelligence outputs can directly substitute for the market value of journalism, leading to a measurable loss of readers, subscription revenues, and advertising impressions for the newspaper. Furthermore, The New York Times has alleged that OpenAI withheld and destroyed evidence by making billions of ChatGPT exchanges inaccessible, an accusation that OpenAI has formally denied.
Comparative Context in Federal Courts
This litigation is widely regarded as the most significant artificial intelligence copyright case in the United States. It forms part of a broader wave of legal challenges where copyright holders have sued artificial intelligence developers, including Anthropic and Meta Platforms, over data ingestion practices.
Previous federal court decisions addressing artificial intelligence training and fair use have offered conflicting legal interpretations. In the precedent of Authors Guild v. Google decided in 2015, Google's scanning of millions of books to build a searchable index was ruled fair use because the application was transformative and did not replace the consumer market for the books. Conversely, in subsequent rulings such as Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, federal courts rejected the fair use defense when protected legal material was utilized to create a directly competing commercial tool.
Downstream Stakes for Stakeholders
For artificial intelligence developers such as OpenAI and Microsoft, the formal support of the Justice Department could strengthen their legal positioning in ongoing copyright battles. Legal observers note that the intervention may influence future judicial rulings regarding what constitutes transformative fair use in machine learning data ingestion.
For content creators and media organizations, a judicial ruling favoring technology companies could significantly restrict their ability to control and monetize copyrighted works when utilized for artificial intelligence training. Such an outcome could accelerate a decline in traditional publishing revenues and necessitate new licensing models across the media sector. The ultimate resolution of the case is expected to establish the baseline legal framework for data acquisition strategies across the technology industry.
