Public Knowledge files amicus brief backing fair use for AI training in OpenAI copyright case

What happened

Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief on 29 October 2026 in In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, in support of defendant OpenAI's motion for summary judgment on fair use grounds, according to the organization's own announcement published 30 October 2026. The consolidated case, assigned to Judge Sidney Stein in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, brings together lawsuits accusing OpenAI of copyright infringement for training its models on protected works.

The argument

The brief urges the court to weigh potential infringement in the training of AI models separately from potential infringement in data acquisition and in AI outputs. Public Knowledge argues that model training, described as using algorithms to extract facts about a work such as word frequency, is a quintessential fair use, and that the act of training must be considered on its own rather than conflated with issues such as potential future infringing uses of the resulting technology. Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose is quoted saying that gutting fair use is not the regulatory response creators need, and that a ruling siding with the plaintiffs' arguments would ignore basic jurisprudence and undercut the public's ability to interact with evolving technology.

What this is not

This is an argument to the court, not a ruling. The court has not decided the fair-use question in this case.