Trump Administration Sides With OpenAI Against New York Times in Copyright Case
The federal government's intervention aligns executive branch policy with a company valued at $852 billion, a posture that could influence how courts weigh AI training data against existing...
The Trump administration filed an extraordinary legal intervention in September 2026 in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI, positioning the federal government in support of the artificial intelligence company and against the newspaper's central legal argument, according to reporting by Folha de S.Paulo.
The New York Times filed suit against OpenAI in 2023, alleging that the company used large volumes of the newspaper's copyrighted articles without authorization or payment to train its large language models. The Times argued OpenAI received a free benefit from protected content, a claim the administration has now formally rejected in court filings.
OpenAI's most recent private valuation stands at $852 billion, according to the same Folha de S.Paulo report. That figure, derived from a fundraising round, makes OpenAI one of the highest-valued private companies in the United States as of the date of this story.
The administration's legal position is that OpenAI's use of copyrighted material for AI model training does not constitute infringement under applicable federal law. The precise statutory or regulatory basis cited in the administration's filing was not detailed in available public reporting as of September 2, 2026. A review of the court docket for the Southern District of New York, where the case is pending, would reveal the full text of the government's submission.
Federal intervention in private civil copyright litigation by the executive branch is uncommon. The mechanism used, typically a Statement of Interest filed under 28 U.S.C. Section 517, allows the Department of Justice to express the government's view in cases where federal law or policy is implicated, without the government itself being a party to the dispute.
The case carries broad implications for the US technology sector. If the Times prevails, AI developers could be required to license training data from publishers, altering cost structures across the industry. If OpenAI prevails, the ruling could establish that large-scale ingestion of copyrighted text for machine learning constitutes fair use, a question no federal appeals court has definitively answered.
Several other US publishers and individual authors have filed separate copyright actions against AI companies in federal courts since 2023. Those cases are proceeding on parallel tracks, and the government's posture in the Times case may signal how the administration would respond if asked to intervene in those proceedings as well.
The Times case is also being watched by US investors in AI-adjacent companies, including chip manufacturers and cloud infrastructure providers, because a ruling requiring paid licensing could raise operational costs for AI firms and compress margins across that supply chain.
OpenAI's legal exposure extends beyond the Times suit. As previously reported by The Congressional Times, New Lawsuits Filed Against OpenAI in U.S. Court Over Canadian School Shooting represent a separate and distinct category of litigation the company faces in US federal courts.
The timeline for a ruling in the Times case is unknown. What would reveal next steps is the court's scheduling order for summary judgment briefing, which is publicly available through the Southern District of New York's PACER filing system.