The US government told a court that training on copyrighted text is fair use
For nearly three years the AI copyright fight has been private companies against private rightsholders, with the government watching. On 2 September the government picked a side.
The Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the New York Times case against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that training a model on copyrighted text transforms the work enough to be fair use, and that the benefit to AI outweighs the competitive harm, partly on national security grounds. A statement of interest binds nobody. It is the government telling a court what it thinks, without becoming a party.
Why this one is different
This is the first time the federal government has taken a formal position in any of them, and there are dozens: authors, publishers, music labels, news organisations, all making roughly the same argument in different courtrooms. Until now the question of whether training is fair use was being answered case by case by individual judges. A statement of interest does not settle it, but every one of those judges has now read what the United States thinks the answer is. The Times replied that the government had sided with a handful of trillion dollar companies against the countless American creators whose work they stole.
It binds nobody, and every judge in every one of these cases has now read it.
How we got here
- Sep 2023Authors including George R. R. Martin and Jodi Picoult sue OpenAI over training on their books.
- 27 Dec 2023The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing the models reproduce its journalism and compete with it.
- 2025The judge throws out most of OpenAI's motions to dismiss, and the bulk of the Times claims proceed.
- Sep 2025Anthropic settles with book authors for $1.5bn over torrented training data, the largest number yet attached to the question.
- 2 Sep 2026The Justice Department files, and says training is fair use.
What it does and does not mean
Start with what it cannot do. A statement of interest has no binding force, does not decide the case, and can be reversed by the next administration with another filing. No judge is obliged to agree, and the Times case still has to be tried. What it does do is change the weather. Every remaining defendant can now cite the United States government in support of the central defence, and every rightsholder now has to argue against their own government as well as against the company that took the work.