The Justice Department is backing OpenAI in its high-stakes legal battle with the New York Times, arguing in a court filing that using copyrighted content to train artificial intelligence models does not violate the law.
The Times first sued OpenAI and key investor Microsoft in December 2023, alleging in Manhattan federal court that the ChatGPT creator had used “millions” of its copyrighted articles to build AI products that directly compete with the newspaper. It is one of several lawsuits accusing OpenAI and other AI giants of copyright infringement.
“The United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” DOJ officials wrote in the court brief published Wednesday.
To justify its stance, the DOJ argued that an adverse ruling in the Times’ favor would hamper development of AI models that “will be critical for US national security capabilities, in part because foreign adversaries won’t be held back by copyright law.
The agency also expressed concern that a ruling against OpenAI “would hamper competition in the market for LLMs, because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees.”
“It would be problematic—and legally incorrect—to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing,” the DOJ added.
A Times spokesperson said the “administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.”
“Both AI and creators can thrive – AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“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.”
The DOJ’s statement was “surprising” – in part because it seemed to contradict the fine print of the administration’s own AI framework, according to Evan Swarztrauber, a former FCC adviser and principal at CorePoint Strategies.
The framework, released in March, called on Congress to consider implementing collective licensing agreements that would require AI companies to fairly compensate media firms for their content.
Swarztrauber speculated that the apparent contradiction “may be the result of a disconnect between the DOJ and the White House.”
“The Administration’s AI framework acknowledges the complexity of copyright litigation, the legitimacy of rights-holder interests, and the importance of licensing to compensate workers,” he said. “The DOJ, in contrast, seems to take an anti-licensing stance while arguing nearly all AI training on copyrighted works is protected.”
News outlets and other online creators have warned for years that AI companies are effectively stealing content without proper credit or compensation – with some describing the situation as an existential threat to the media industry.
The News/Media Alliance, a trade group that represents more than 2,000 outlets including The Post, expressed concern over the DOJ’s filing.
“We understand the draw of economic investment that AI companies are promising, but strict application of the law is required by the courts, and we continue to believe the NYT has a winning case,” Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, told The Post.
“We would also note the enormous economic and societal contribution of the creative community to America,” Coffey added.
The White House declined to comment.
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment on the filing.