DOJ sides with OpenAI in the New York Times lawsuit

The U.S. Justice Department has sided with OpenAI and Microsoft in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit, according to reports from the Washington Post, the Guardian, The Verge and the New York Post. The department urged the judge to rule for the AI companies in a case that has become one of the most important legal tests for generative AI.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that copyrighted journalism was used to train AI systems and could be reproduced or substituted by AI outputs. OpenAI and Microsoft have argued that model training should be protected under copyright doctrines such as fair use, and that the case should not block the broader development of AI tools.

The administration’s intervention matters because it puts federal weight behind the AI industry’s core legal position. If courts accept that argument, AI companies would gain more room to train models on large text corpora. If they reject it, publishers could win more leverage over licensing, damages and restrictions on training data.

The case is still in court, so the DOJ position is not a final ruling. But it raises the stakes for publishers, AI labs and platforms that are negotiating how journalism, search, chatbots and model training should coexist.