News publishers ask court to give 'no weight' to Justice Department's fair-use backing of OpenAI and Microsoft

What happened: On Monday, September 28, 2026, the news-publisher plaintiffs (the New York Times, Daily News and other publishers) in the consolidated copyright MDL against OpenAI and Microsoft (In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 25-md-3143, S.D.N.Y.) filed a response to the Justice Department's September 1 statement of interest, asking Judge Sidney H. Stein to give the DOJ's filing "no weight at all." The publishers argue the DOJ's position - that training AI models on copyrighted text is fair use and that restricting it would threaten national security and American competitiveness - is a policy statement reflecting the administration's pro-AI agenda rather than an independent assessment of copyright law. They note the DOJ filed before the parties' summary-judgment briefs were unsealed, so it never saw internal company documents and testimony in which tech executives described their AI products as substitutive for news subscriptions. The News/Media Alliance's CEO, Danielle Coffey, said the largest AI companies have already acknowledged internally that they need to license content and can afford to do so, and quoted the companies' own unsealed words calling the practice "the largest theft of labor in human history."

Why it matters to creators: This is the publishers' direct rebuttal to the first-ever federal government intervention in an AI-training copyright case. How much weight the court gives the DOJ's fair-use framing could shape the fair-use analysis not only in this MDL but in the parallel author cases proceeding on the same schedule. The response also centers the licensing market in the fair-use debate - publishers argue the AI industry can and should pay for content, which bears on the market-harm analysis that affects every creator's leverage.

What is not yet known: How Judge Stein will weigh the statement of interest; it is non-binding and no ruling on the merits has issued. These are the plaintiffs' arguments, not a judicial finding about the government's motives.