Trump administration backs OpenAI against New York Times in copyright dispute

The Trump administration has sided with OpenAI in a long-running legal dispute with the New York Times, which accuses the maker of ChatGPT of violating copyright by using its content to train its artificial intelligence models. An official document filed with the New York federal court in charge of the case and consulted by AFP on Thursday, invokes issues of “scientific progress”, economic growth and “national security” in support of the position of the American government.

“For all these reasons, the United States has a major interest in this court rejecting any argument according to which the training of large language models (LLM) on protected texts (...) would violate copyright,” argue the executive's lawyers in this 20-page declaration. A spokesperson for the New York Times quoted by the daily, Graham James, reacted by accusing the Trump administration of siding with a handful of “multi-billion dollar companies” to the detriment of creators.

This position in favor of companies being able to appropriate content without approval or remuneration from their authors “would compromise the sustainability of content created by humans, on which a healthy society depends and which AI needs to function,” he added.

The dispute between the New York Times and OpenAI is already old in light of the accelerated development of generative AI: the daily initiated its proceedings against the manufacturer of ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft, almost three years ago, at the end of December 2023. Denouncing “a violation of copyright in terms of content and journalistic work”, the Times estimated at the time the damage suffered at “several billion dollars”. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft have reacted to the government's “statement of interest” so far.