U.S. Justice Department files statement of interest backing fair use for AI training in New York Times case

What happened

On 1 September 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a 20-page statement of interest in the consolidated copyright proceedings against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where The New York Times is among the plaintiffs. The filing argues that training large language models on copyrighted texts is "extraordinarily transformative" and should be treated as fair use, while expressly declining to defend model outputs that reconstruct and disseminate an original copyrighted work. The Times responded the following day that the administration was siding with large AI companies at the expense of American creators.

Why it may matter to you

This is the first time the U.S. government has stated a position in litigation over whether using copyrighted material to train AI models is lawful. If a court adopts the government's reasoning, it could make it harder for creators to argue that the training step alone infringes their rights — though claims about how training data was acquired, and about outputs that reproduce protected expression, remain live questions the filing does not address.

What is not yet known

A statement of interest carries no binding authority: Judge Sidney Stein will decide the fair use question independently, and no ruling on the merits has been issued. The filing was made shortly before summary-judgment motions were due, so the court's own analysis is still to come.