US Government Backs OpenAI in High-Stakes Copyright Lawsuit
Federal officials filed a legal brief asserting that training AI on public web data qualifies as fair use.
The US Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in federal court supporting OpenAI against copyright infringement claims brought by publishers including The New York Times.
The legal filing argues that scraping public text to train machine learning models qualifies under the fair use doctrine, which allows limited use of copyrighted work without permission for transformative purposes. Government lawyers wrote that maintaining strong domestic AI capabilities serves a vital national interest in setting global technological standards.
Publishers maintain that AI models absorb expressive creative work to generate commercial competitors without compensation, but the government's intervention gives AI labs major momentum as the landmark cases move toward summary judgment.
What this means for you as a builder
This legal filing reduces regulatory uncertainty around using foundation models trained on open-web datasets. While you still need to protect proprietary business records and customer data in your own workflows, standard commercial models look less likely to face sudden legal bans on their core training sets.