In a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI, the Trump administration contributed a 20-page brief defending the ChatGPT maker’s unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs.
“The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standards for AI use practices and procedures around the world…As such, it is important for the United States to ‘maintain global leadership in artificial intelligence,’” the brief reads, referring to an executive order signed last year by President Donald Trump.
The LLMs that power chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on incomprehensibly large databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media, which AI companies feed into without permission. Many publishers, including this time in the New York Times, are trying to argue that it is illegal for AI companies like OpenAI to use copyrighted material to train AI models.
The question — can copyrighted material be used to train AI? — is not so black and white, and there is extensive legal debate surrounding this subject. These conversations often focus on fair use, a carving out of copyright law that carves out exceptions for certain scenarios when using someone else’s copyrighted work without permission is deemed lawful. In this case, the fair use argument revolves around whether the AI company’s use of the copyrighted material is “transformative” enough for a judge to consider it legal.
“Restricting the development of LLMs based on a misinterpretation of the fair use doctrine would impede such creative and scientific progress while impeding the prosperity and economic mobility of the United States,” the brief states.
So far, lawsuits over AI training and copyright infringement have largely been favorable to AI companies. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to a group of authors whose work was used to train the company’s AI models. But Anthropic has had a bad reputation when it comes to AI training. Rather, the company was fined for using illegal shadow libraries to pirate books used for training.
“Like readers who aspire to be writers, Anthropic’s LLMs trained their work to turn difficult corners and create something different, rather than rushing forward to imitate or supplant their work,” Judge Alsup wrote, likening the LLM’s training to a person reading a book.
The new Trump administration brief is not a judgment because the case is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the brief’s author lacks jurisdiction. However, this latest intervention by the Trump administration may still have important implications.
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