The Trump administration has officially stepped into the legal battle between OpenAI and The New York Times, backing the AI company's argument that training its models on copyrighted news articles is protected by the "fair use" doctrine.
In court papers filed on September 1, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that the "creative possibilities and public benefits" of training large language models on such content "far outweigh any competitive harm". The DOJ warned that siding with The New York Times would thwart "creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility". The filing also framed the issue as a matter of national security, arguing that AI models help "national security officials analyze and draw inferences from real-world facts" found in news articles. "Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries," the DOJ wrote.
The Justice Department's position aligns with the AI industry's defense that training LLMs is "transformative" fair use because it uses "copyrighted work not to duplicate the work's expressive content, but as part of a process to learn and act on statistical patterns in written text". The New York Times criticized the administration's stance. "The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole," said Graham James, a spokesperson for the paper. The Times sued OpenAI in 2023, arguing the company is "effectively stealing billions of dollars' worth of their work".
The AI Cold War has gone corporate, with trade bans, lawsuits, and the battle for talent reshaping the industry. Apple's trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI marked a dramatic escalation in the AI race, exposing fierce battles over intellectual property and artificial intelligence leadership. The Trump administration's intervention in this copyright case is the latest front in that ongoing war.