The US government is sparking debate with a new legal filing that claims an artificial intelligence company must train its models on copyrighted material to remain competitive. During a recent copyright lawsuit between OpenAI and The New York Times, an official document submitted by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. argues that forcing a developer to pay licensing fees would slow down domestic progress and give foreign rivals an advantage.
The court filing sides with massive tech corporations over creators
According to the document, an incorrect fair use ruling would harm the broader market for large language models. The filing suggests that only the wealthiest tech corporations could afford to pay licensing fees for training data. However, critics point out that the current landscape is already dominated by a few massive tech giants, making this defense seem hollow.
The New York Times responded to the government filing with strong criticism. A spokesperson for the publication stated that the administration is prioritizing trillion-dollar AI developers while ignoring the rights of American creators. The newspaper maintains that these models can still thrive if a tech brand pays fairly for the content that makes its software function properly.
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The ongoing lawsuit challenges how language models consume online data
The core of the dispute centers on how these programs use existing work. The government filing argues that the transformative nature of training language models outweighs any market impact on the original copyrighted texts. The document asserts that strict laws threaten national security by making it harder to build a capable domestic tech industry.
Despite these claims, many creators argue that the output from these models often plagiarizes original content without proper citation. The lawsuit from The New York Times, which began in December 2023, is still working its way through the system. The court requested that any final amicus briefs be submitted by October 16, 2026, leaving the ultimate decision in the hands of the judge rather than the administration.
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