In a lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI, the Trump administration has contributed a 20-page brief in defense of the ChatGPT maker\u2019s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally\u2026 As such, it is critical for the United States to \u2018retain global leadership in artificial intelligence,\u2019\u201d the brief reads, referencing an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year.<\/p>\n
The LLMs powering chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on incomprehensibly massive databases of published works, including copyrighted books, articles, and other media that AI companies feed into these databases without permission. Many publishers, including The New York Times in this case, have sought to argue that it is illegal for AI companies like OpenAI to train AI models on their copyrighted material.<\/p>\n
This question \u2014 can you use copyrighted material to train an AI? \u2014 isn\u2019t black and white, hence the extensive legal debate around the subject. These conversations often center on fair use, a carve out of copyright law that makes exceptions for certain scenarios when it can be ruled legal to use someone else\u2019s copyrighted work without permission. In this case, the fair use debate addresses whether AI companies\u2019 use of copyrighted work is \u201ctransformative\u201d enough for a judge to rule it legal.<\/p>\n
\u201cConstraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility,\u201d the brief says.<\/p>\n
So far, cases about AI training and copyright infringement have largely been favorable to AI companies. Last year, Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion copyright settlement to a group of writers whose works were used to train the company\u2019s AI models; but Anthropic wasn\u2019t dinged for its AI training. Rather, the company was fined for using illegal shadow libraries to pirate the books it used for training.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic\u2019s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them \u2014 but to turn a hard corner and create something different,\u201d Judge Alsup wrote, comparing the LLM\u2019s training to a human reading a book.<\/p>\n
This new Trump administration brief is not a ruling, as the case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the authors of the brief do not have jurisdiction. However, this intervention by the Trump administration could still carry weight.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2263890424.jpg?w=1024″] In a lawsuit that The New York Times filed against OpenAI, the Trump administration has contributed a 20-page brief in defense of the ChatGPT maker\u2019s unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs. \u201cThe United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2125769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2125769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2125769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2125769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2125769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}