Conservative groups file amicus brief urging court to reject broad fair use for OpenAI's web crawling

What happened

Conservative groups led by the Center for American Rights, a right-leaning nonprofit law firm focused on tech and telecom policy, were reported on 29 October 2026 to have submitted an amicus brief in the consolidated copyright litigation against OpenAI in Manhattan federal court, urging the court not to accept a broad fair-use reading that would let AI companies crawl the internet without compensating news outlets and other content providers. Cosigners named by the New York Post include the Article III Project and the Internet Accountability Project, the Bull Moose Project, Consumers For A Strong Economy, and lawyer Joel Thayer.

The argument

The brief argues that if superintelligence companies are permitted to 'recklessly crawl the internet, even past paywalls', smaller content companies lose their competitive advantage and the AI companies become 'the ultimate distributors of our information', destroying the incentive for creators to provide free, open content. It frames strong copyright protection as consistent with the Trump administration's stated goals, including its 'superintelligence' agenda, and warns that accepting OpenAI's expansive view of fair use would encourage foreign adversaries to continue 'distillation' attacks - using an advanced model to train a less capable one without permission - and give them legal immunity for doing so.

Context

The underlying litigation, led by The New York Times' December 2023 suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleges OpenAI used millions of copyrighted articles to train AI products that compete with the newspapers; OpenAI argues the use is fair use. Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected OpenAI's bid to dismiss the case in March 2025 but has not yet ruled on fair use. The brief lands against a backdrop in which the Justice Department argued last month that using copyrighted content to train AI models does not violate the law - a position the Post reports surprised tech policy experts. The brief is advocacy by the filing groups, not a court ruling, and the court has not decided the fair-use question.