- The Trump administration filed a letter supporting OpenAI in its copyright fight with The New York Times.
- The government endorsed the argument that training AI on others’ IP is fair use.
- Federal support could influence one of the most consequential AI copyright cases.
- The outcome bears on how all AI firms source training data.
What Happened
The Trump administration has taken OpenAI‘s side in its legal battle with The New York Times, WIRED reported on September 2, 2026. The government wrote a letter in support of OpenAI‘s argument that training AI models on others’ intellectual property constitutes fair use.
Why It Matters
The Times’s suit against OpenAI is the highest-profile test of whether training large models on copyrighted text without a license is lawful. Federal backing for the fair-use position adds significant weight on OpenAI’s side of a question that will shape the economics of the entire industry — whether AI developers must license training data or can treat the open web as fair game.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, alleging its articles were copied to train models that now compete with it. The case is one of dozens of copyright suits filed against AI companies by authors, artists, and publishers. A ruling for the Times could compel industry-wide licensing deals; a ruling for OpenAI would entrench the practice of training on publicly available data — which is why a government letter taking a side is unusually consequential.
Technical Details
Fair use is a four-factor legal test weighing, among other things, the purpose of the use and its effect on the market for the original work. The government’s letter endorses the transformation argument — that training a model on text to learn statistical patterns is a fundamentally different use than republishing it. The Times contends that models can reproduce its articles and substitute for its journalism, undercutting that claim.
Who’s Affected
Every frontier AI developer — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta — has a direct stake, since an adverse ruling would force costly licensing regimes. Publishers and rights holders face a precedent that could weaken their leverage. Ongoing licensing negotiations across the media industry hinge on how courts weigh the fair-use question.
What’s Next
The court is not bound by the administration’s position, but a government fair-use endorsement is a meaningful input. The case’s outcome — and any appeals — will set the ground rules for AI training data, and will inform the many parallel copyright suits now moving through the courts.
