Donald Trump told GOP congressional candidates visiting the White House on Wednesday evening that “the media has gained respect for us, they cannot believe what we’ve done.”
The New York Times might beg to differ, at least when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Almost a day after the Justice Department filed paperwork in federal court backing OpenAI in its consolidated copyright infringement battle with the New York Times, Florida and Arkansas papers, The Intercept, other outlets and a galaxy of scribe stars, the NYT took the tech-lord-friendly administration to the woodshed.
“The Administration is siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” Times spokesman Graham James told Deadline tonight.
“In this litigation, the New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI’s large language models,” the DOJ said in its statement of interest filing late Tuesday, spotlighting the paper that has proved a thorn in Trump’s paw over and over.
Stressing the benefits of more powerful American-based AI “far outweigh any competitive harm,” the filing avoided the politics, personal and otherwise, of the matter but was blunt about its goals. “The United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” the government said.
Clearly, having previously fought off efforts by OpenAI to get the case tossed, the Times sees its copyright and copyright law differently in this potentially pivotal case.
“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,” James added Wednesday of the nearly three-year old action. “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.”
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Assistant AG Brett Shumate don’t quite seem to think that permission the Times cites is part of the real big picture when it comes to AI. In fact, noting their “legal arguments apply similarly to all parties in this litigation and the related cases, including book authors and publishers,” the DOJ brass are very much on the side of doing whatever it takes to make sure the ever-growing amounts of content tech companies desire to feed and build their models is available ASAP.
“The 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,” they say in today’s filing. “The United States thus has a strong interest in the question whether training AI models on written works constitutes ‘fair use’ under copyright law.”
The Department of Justice in Washington, DC
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Emphasizing that “effective integration of AI will be critical for U.S. national security capabilities,” the 20-page SOI perhaps overplays its hand as well.
Stating the obvious that “foreign adversaries have similar goals,” the fed’s focus is briefly but crucially on the power of the laws that govern U.S. copyright. Not in a great way, it seems: “Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States therefore threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered.”
Today’s filing lets that statement hang there.
Speaking of the human-created content the NYT mentioned in its response today, some of the very human writers facing off against Sam Altman‘s big-bucks crew include Game of Thrones kingpin George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Bosch creator Michael Connelly, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult, plus Sarah Silverman and the Authors Guild. David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Sylvia Day, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor LaValle, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow, and Rachel Vail are also in the mix.
Despite billions in expenditures with no real profits to show for it, OpenAI is widely expected to unveil an IPO soon. The state of Florida may have gone after OpenAI in court in June for the “great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence, and related harms,” but that didn’t stop the Altman-run company filing IPO paperwork with the SEC the same month.
As for the NYC-based copyright action, there could be a big public moves sooner rather than later.
On August 31, Judge Sidney H. Stein said in the court docket “Plaintiff is ordered to show cause in writing on or before September 11, 2026, why this action should not be stayed pending resolution of summary judgment motions in the other active cases in this multi-district litigation” He added: “Defendants’ response, if any, shall be filed by September 18, 2026.”
September 11 this year is the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on NYC’s World Trade Center towers.
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