The Trump administration is wading into a legal fight between OpenAI and the New York Times , backing the ChatGPT-maker’s argument in a closely watched case over how it builds its AI technology by ingesting and processing millions of news articles.
The Times has since been joined by other news organisations, including MediaNews Group-owned newspapers the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune , digital media publisher Ziff Davis and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. The company has been sued by several writers — including comedian Sarah Silverman — who say their books were ingested to train OpenAI’s AI models without their permission. The Times sued OpenAI in 2023, arguing that the company was threatening its journalists’ livelihoods by effectively stealing billions of dollars’ worth of their work, in some cases spitting out The Times ’ material verbatim to people seeking answers from generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. The threat to news publications became even more apparent when, in 2024, Google introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of online search results, cutting off the advertising dollars that come when people click a link to the information’s original source.
In court papers filed on Tuesday (September 1, 2026), the Justice Department supported OpenAI’s argument that training its models on troves of writings found on the internet is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. It told the court that siding with The New York Times and other publishers who argue OpenAI’s practice violates copyright law would thwart “creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.
