US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material

The Trump administration submitted a legal brief supporting OpenAI's use of copyrighted material to train its language models in a lawsuit filed by The New York Times. The administration argued that restricting this practice would harm American artificial intelligence development and global competitiveness. The core legal question centers on whether AI companies' use of copyrighted works without permission qualifies as "fair use," a copyright law exception that applies to transformative uses. Previous court cases have largely favored AI companies in this dispute, though the legal status remains contested.