The DOJ filed a brief siding with OpenAI in its copyright lawsuit with the New York Times, arguing that training AI systems on copyrighted material counts as fair use. The DOJ’s brief does not completely align with the Trump Administration’s AI framework released earlier this year.
Politico reports that the DOJ brief, filed Tuesday in New York federal court, is the first time the federal government has weighed in on copyright lawsuits over AI training. The Times sued OpenAI over what it calls mass theft of its journalism, and the case could shape a wave of similar lawsuits from news and music publishers and film studios against AI companies.
The DOJ brief leans hard on national security. Restricting how AI companies train their models, the department wrote, would put the United States at a disadvantage against rivals abroad. “Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States therefore threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered,” the department argued. It cited AI’s use in analyzing intelligence, improving weapon systems and giving battlefield recommendations, including missile strike targeting, as things the country risks losing.
The brief also frames this as a competition issue. Narrower fair use protections, the DOJ argued, would let only the biggest tech companies afford licensing fees, entrenching legacy media outlets and squeezing out competition in the large language model market. The department imagined a future where independent publishers and authors use AI to generate images instead of hiring photographers or paying for licenses.
Instead of asking whether AI tools cost publishers readers, the DOJ wants courts to ask whether the technology creates “significant substitutive competition.” The DOJ also pointed out that the public doesn’t have open access to the articles OpenAI used to train its models.
The filing also goes after a federal judge’s ruling in a separate lawsuit authors brought against Meta. The DOJ said that ruling wrongly treated AI training and AI outputs as one continuous act, and wrongly accepted the theory that AI dilutes the market for original work just by creating the potential for competing, AI-generated books. It urged the court in the OpenAI case to reject that reasoning and warned against requiring payment for training based only on the possibility that AI-generated work might someday compete with human-authored work.
The brief lands alongside research on how AI is hitting creative industries financially. A 2026 study by Tuhin Chakrabarty found book revenue fell most sharply in the genres where AI-generated content is most common.
The Times is one of dozens of news publishers suing AI companies over the use of copyrighted material in training data, and most of those cases are expected to turn on the fair use question. Last year, a federal judge declined to dismiss the core copyright infringement claims in the Times‘ suit against OpenAI, though the judge did narrow the case’s scope.
The Times pushed back hard. A spokesperson accused the DOJ of “siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole.” The paper believes both industries can succeed without one exploiting the other, the spokesperson said: “Both AI and creators can thrive – AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires.” Letting companies use such content without permission or payment, the spokesperson added, “would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”
Breitbart News reported in March that the Trump administration released its AI framework, which addresses intellectual property in Point III (emphasis added by Breitbart News):
American creators, publishers, and innovators should be protected from AI generated outputs that infringe their protected content, without undermining lawful
innovation and free expression.• Although the Administration believes that training of AI models on copyrighted material does not violate copyright laws, it acknowledges arguments to the contrary exist and therefore supports allowing the Courts to resolve this issue. Similarly, Congress should not take any actions that would impact the judiciary’s resolution of whether training on copyrighted material constitutes fair use.
• Congress should consider enabling licensing frameworks or collective rights systems for rights holders to collectively negotiate compensation from AI providers, without incurring antitrust liability. Any such legislation, however, should not address when or whether such licensing is required.
• Congress should consider establishing a federal framework protecting individuals from the unauthorized distribution or commercial use of AI-generated digital replicas of their voice, likeness, or other identifiable attributes, while providing clear exceptions for parody, satire, news reporting, and other expressive works protected by the First Amendment. Congress should prevent persons from abusing such a framework to stifle free speech online.
• Congress should continue to carefully monitor the development of copyright precedents and enforcement in the courts and evaluate whether, due to novel AI considerations, additional action beyond that proposed here is needed to fill potential gaps or provide additional protections for content creators.
The legal war over the usage of copyrighted works by AI giants impacts every author, creator, and media company in the country. Like all aspects of AI, its application in creating media presents opportunities and landmines. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Politico here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.