The US Department of Justice has filed a court submission backing OpenAI in a major copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times, several other newspapers and a group of prominent authors, prompting a sharp rebuke from the Times. The intervention matters because it signals the Trump administration's willingness to use federal legal weight to support AI companies' use of copyrighted material for training, potentially shaping how fair-use doctrine is interpreted in a case with wide implications for publishers, writers and the AI industry.

In its "statement of interest" filed late on Tuesday, the DOJ argued that training large language models on copyrighted texts should not be found to violate copyright law, saying the benefits of stronger US-based AI "far outweigh any competitive harm" and framing the issue as one of national security given competition from foreign rivals. The Times, whose case is nearly three years old and includes co-plaintiffs such as Florida and Arkansas newspapers, The Intercept, and authors including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Sarah Silverman, accused the administration of siding with "trillion-dollar AI companies" over creators, insisting AI firms should pay fairly for the content they use.