In a lawsuit initiated by The New York Times against OpenAI, the Trump administration has submitted a 20-page brief defending the ChatGPT creator’s use of copyrighted content to train its large language models (LLMs) without explicit permission.
“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… As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,’” the brief states, referencing an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year.
The LLMs that power conversational AI like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained using vast databases of published materials, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media, which AI companies integrate into these databases without obtaining consent. Many publishers, including The New York Times in this particular case, have argued that AI companies such as OpenAI are engaging in illegal activity by training their AI models on proprietary content.
The question of whether copyrighted material can legally be used to train AI models is nuanced, prompting extensive legal debate. These discussions frequently center on the concept of fair use, a specific provision in copyright law that allows for exceptions where using someone else’s copyrighted work without permission can be deemed lawful. In this scenario, the fair use discussion examines whether AI companies’ utilization of copyrighted works is sufficiently “transformative” to be considered legal by a judge.
“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 brief says.
So far, legal actions concerning AI training and copyright infringement have mostly concluded favorably for AI companies. Last year, Judge William Alsup directed Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to a collective of writers whose works were incorporated into the company’s AI models. However, Anthropic was not penalized for its AI training methods themselves, but rather for employing illegal