Justice Department Tells a Federal Court That Training AI on Copyrighted Work Is Fair Use, Siding With OpenAI Against the New York Times

The Justice Department filed a 20-page statement of interest late on Sept. 1, 2026 with U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein in the Southern District of New York, telling the court that training large language models on copyrighted text is fair use. The filing, from Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, states that "the United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law," and argues that rules making a robust American AI industry harder to build "threaten national security." The department said its arguments apply to all parties in the litigation, including authors and publishers.

A statement of interest lets the government state a position without joining as a party. It is the first time the federal government has formally taken a side in the copyright suits against AI companies - here against a newspaper the president has repeatedly attacked.

A Times spokesman 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." Stein has ordered briefing on a possible stay, with a response due Sept. 11.