Further reporting confirms DOJ brief supports OpenAI's fair-use position
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest on September 3 in the OpenAI vs. New York Times copyright lawsuit, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. The DOJ called LLM training 'transformative, spectacularly so,' contending that models learn statistical relationships rather than reproduce content for its original purpose, and distinguished the training stage from separate questions about how data was acquired and whether outputs reproduce protected passages. The administration warned that rules making AI development harder in the United States 'threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries,' adding that blanket licensing could disadvantage smaller U.S. firms. One commentator said the brief argues on national security grounds to invalidate copyright law and noted 'this is not how law works'.