Chamber of Progress, Abundance Institute and musician Trevor Lawrence Jr. file brief backing AI training as fair use in OpenAI MDL

What happened

On 30 October 2026, the Chamber of Progress joined Grammy-winning musician Trevor Lawrence Jr. and the Abundance Institute in filing an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, the consolidated multi-district case against OpenAI and Microsoft before Judge Sidney Stein in the Southern District of New York, urging the court to recognize AI model training as fair use as a matter of law.

What the brief argues

The brief argues that training AI on copyrighted works to identify patterns, rather than to reproduce protected expression, is transformative and enables new forms of human creativity. It highlights how working musicians use generative AI to explore arrangements, refine performances, and bring creative projects to life with fewer resources, and warns that requiring permission for transformative AI training could restrict access to these tools, particularly for independent artists. It asks the court to grant OpenAI's motion for summary judgment on fair use as to the training uses addressed in the brief and to reject the plaintiffs' competing motions on those uses.

Status

This is an amicus filing in support of the defendants' fair-use position, not a ruling. It is the defendant-side counterpart to the wave of plaintiff-side briefs filed the same week, including the RIAA-led and AI Coalition for Data Integrity briefs. The court has not decided the fair-use question.