Trump administration sides with OpenAI in lawsuit against New York Times

The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot.

Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023.

A brief has advisory rather than legal weight but could bolster tech companies as they fight the claims.

“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 … As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence’,” the brief said.

They say the companies misuse their material to train AI systems and do so without compensation.

For AI chatbots to generate responses, machine learning systems are first fed billions of lines of text.

The bots produce their output by statistical analysis of what the next word should be by matching a user’s query to parts of the database.

Spokespeople for the Times and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing on Wednesday.

“AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans,” US associate attorney general Stanley Woodward Jr said in a statement posted to X.

The first two judges to consider the question issued diverging rulings last year. skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion The government agreed with tech companies in Tuesday’s brief that AI training is “extraordinarily” transformative.

“Beyond the subject matter of this litigation, LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs,” the brief said.

“Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.” Explore more on these topicsTechnology AI (artificial intelligence) OpenAI New York Times Trump administration Newspapers Newspapers & magazines news Share Reuse this content