The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging unlawful training on its journalism and seeking billions in damages. This week the Trump administration filed a statement of interest supporting OpenAI's claim that training on copyrighted text is fair use.

The filing is not a ruling. It is the federal government putting its thumb on the scale in a private case that will set the tone for every other publisher suit. US attorneys wrote that narrowing fair use to exclude LLM training would be 'inconsistent with basic copyright law principles' and would 'severely hamper the Progress of Science and useful Arts.' They went further: constraining LLM development would hinder 'American prosperity and economic mobility.'

That last phrase is the tell. This is industrial policy argued through copyright, not a narrow brief about one defendant's facts.

The administration has already said AI training should count as fair use in its National AI Legislative Framework. Using a statement of interest to repeat that in the Times docket is how you turn a white paper into courtroom weather. One official has called these filings 'incredibly' successful at advancing policy aims. Expect more of them wherever a private lawsuit could freeze a preferred training regime.

The Times case is the right vehicle if you want a national default. A win for OpenAI here would pressure other outlets still in court — the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News — to settle on licensing rather than litigate a fair-use wall. A loss would make the 2025 Anthropic books ruling look like a narrow carve-out: that judge allowed training on lawfully purchased books and still left Anthropic exposed on piracy, which ended in a $1.5 billion authors' settlement.

The politics are not subtle. Trump is separately pursuing a defamation suit against the Times. That does not decide the copyright question, but it does explain why this particular defendant got a public assist. The fair-use inquiry, the attorneys concede, 'hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case.' Then they argue it would be 'legally incorrect' to impose broad copyright liability that would generally make training without a license impermissible. That is a general rule wearing a facts-and-circumstances hat.

Meanwhile the market has already split. AP, Axel Springer, and Vox Media licensed to OpenAI. The Times licensed to Amazon in 2025 so its news and recipes can appear in Amazon's generative tools. The remaining fight is about who can still extract a check, and who has to accept a national fair-use default. Signal Desk's read: the White House wants the default. Publishers who have not signed should assume they are negotiating against that clock.

Statements of interest let the Justice Department speak in private litigation without becoming a party. They do not bind the judge. They do change how a district court reads political risk, especially in a case already framed as a referendum on American AI competitiveness.