US government backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright fight

US government backs OpenAI in New York Times copyright fight

2 min read•Sep 4, 2026•
Ben Harris
Ben Harris

The Trump administration has sided with OpenAI in its copyright fight with The New York Times, first reported by Wired. The government says whether AI training on copyrighted works is fair use matters to whether the US AI industry can retain global leadership, with its arguments applying to related cases involving other publishers and authors as well.

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that the companies trained AI tools on its articles without permission. Government lawyers told the court Tuesday that the United States has a strong interest in the fair-use question, calling the Times’ definition inconsistent with current copyright law and warning a victory could have disastrous consequences.

The filing describes LLM training on copyrighted works as extraordinarily transformative because the systems meaningfully change their inputs. It says OpenAI’s LLMs do not significantly compete with Times articles, two conditions courts consider alongside other fair-use factors.

The government said the arguments apply to all parties in the case and related cases involving publishers and authors. Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at Neal & McDevitt, said Judge Sidney H. Stein need not follow the letter, though judges overseeing similar cases will almost certainly take it seriously because it comes from the Department of Justice.

New York Times spokesperson Graham James said AI companies should pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, while Authors Guild chief executive Mary Rasenberger called the letter faulty and a gross misunderstanding of fair use and copyright law.

The two biggest AI copyright decisions so far produced different outcomes. Meta technically won Kadrey v. Meta last year after plaintiffs did not produce enough evidence that training caused them harm, although the judge said training on copyrighted materials without permission might be illegal in other circumstances.

Anthropic lost its case and must pay authors $1.5 billion in damages, the largest copyright settlement in national history; a judge ruled the training itself was fair use but that Anthropic had pirated the books. Late last week, Sony and Warner Music sued Anthropic, following another suit from music giants including Universal Music Group. In both cases, the companies allege that copyrighted material was stolen to train Claude, and Anthropic is mounting a fair-use defense.

Arizona appeals court vacates manslaughter sentence after AI video

An Arizona appeals court vacated the 10.5-year sentence of Gabriel Horcasitas while upholding his manslaughter conviction, first reported by Nytimes. The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing without the video, after judges found that it presented scripted statements as if the victim himself were speaking in court.

The three-judge panel said the video generated a likeness of Christopher Pelkey’s voice and appearance but did not reflect actual events. It found that allowing and relying on the video made the sentencing fundamentally unfair, and noted that no prior Arizona case had addressed the admissibility of such a depiction at sentencing.

The judges said a victim’s right to speak cannot override a defendant’s right to be sentenced on accurate, reliable information. They said the video collapsed the distinction between the family’s belief about what Pelkey would have said and Pelkey’s own voice and opinions.

The ruling distinguishes family members speaking about Pelkey from a generated likeness that appeared to speak for him.

Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, presented the video during Horcasitas’s sentencing alongside victim-impact statements from family and friends. Wales wrote the script and said her husband and the couple’s longtime business partner helped create the video using Pelkey’s voice from a YouTube video and his face and torso from a funeral-service poster.

Judge Todd F. Lang praised the video as genuine, then imposed the maximum sentence of 10.5 years, more than the nine years prosecutors had sought.

Wales said nobody intended to make the court believe Pelkey was alive or that he had recorded the video before his death. She said she disagreed with the ruling and argued that families use slide shows, collages, hypothetical conversations and poetry to convey grief.

Wales compared the AI video with photography, saying it took 15 years of landmark cases around the 1860s before photography was widely accepted in courts.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for a new sentencing hearing without the AI-generated video.