The U.S. government just told a court that AI companies should be allowed to train on copyrighted articles.

Here's the full story, via the Associated Press.

"The Trump administration is wading into a legal fight between OpenAI and the New York Times, backing the ChatGPT-maker's argument in a closely watched case over how it builds its AI technology by ingesting and processing millions of news articles." In court papers, the Justice Department argued that training AI models on internet writing is protected by the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.

"The Justice Department wrote that 'the creative possibilities and public benefits' of training large language models on such content 'far outweigh any competitive harm.'" It told the court that siding with The Times would "thwart creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility."

Justice Department attorneys wrote that AI's "creative benefits often overlap with national security interests," because AI models can "help national security officials analyze and draw inferences from (unprotected) real-world facts such as those conveyed in New York Times articles."

The New York Times said the administration "is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole." Spokesperson Graham James added: "Both AI and creators can thrive, AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires. The Administration's proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function."

The Times sued OpenAI in 2023, arguing the company was "free-riding" on its journalism to build "substitutive products without permission or payment," in some cases reproducing Times material verbatim. Other publishers, including MediaNews Group's New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune, digital publisher Ziff Davis, and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, have since joined. Separately, authors including comedian Sarah Silverman have sued OpenAI over books allegedly used to train its models without permission.

This is the government's legal position, filed as a brief, not a court ruling, the presiding judge still decides the underlying fair-use question. But it's a forceful signal of where federal policy may be heading on one of the defining legal fights of the AI era.

Source: Associated Press (Alanna Durkin Richer): https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-new-york-times-openai-copyright-dbb22e8e02c660ee5a8644915dec39a4