U.S. Justice Department Backs OpenAI in New York Times Copyright Lawsuit
The United States Department of Justice has filed a legal filing in support of OpenAI and Microsoft in the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the New York Times — a step described by trade press as highly unusual for the federal government to take in an active private litigation.
The filing, a "statement of interest" — a formal document that lets the government weigh in on a case even though it is not a party to it — was reported by Publishers Marketplace on 3 September 2026. Reuters reported a day earlier that the government "has a strong interest" in the court rejecting any argument that training large language models (the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT) on copyrighted texts violates copyright law.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on 27 December 2023, alleging that the companies trained their AI models on millions of Times articles without authorisation or compensation. The case has since become one of the most closely watched legal battles over how artificial intelligence companies use copyrighted material to build their products.
The DOJ's legal position flows from an executive order titled "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence." According to the Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department argued that restricting AI training on copyrighted content would thwart progress and threaten national security.
What makes the filing especially significant for the publishing world is a single footnote. The DOJ's statement of interest includes a note declaring that its legal arguments apply not only to OpenAI and Microsoft in this case, but similarly to all parties in the litigation and related cases — including book authors and publishers (Publishers Marketplace). That means the government's stance reaches beyond newspapers into the entire ecosystem of written work.
The broader legal landscape around AI and copyright is still taking shape. A DOJ publication from the Journal of Federal Law and Practice, dated 31 July 2026, notes that several cases have been filed over the use of copyrighted works to train AI models, and references a settlement described as the largest copyright recovery in such cases to date. Separately, a Department of Justice paper by James Broughel discusses a proposed European Union law that could require companies to produce summaries of copyrighted materials used to train AI algorithms — a different regulatory approach from the one the U.S. government is now advocating in court.
For authors and publishers watching these cases, the DOJ's filing signals that the federal government intends to argue, in effect, that the development of AI should not be constrained by the kind of copyright claims that publishers and writers are now bringing. Whether courts will agree is a separate question — and one that the New York Times case, along with parallel suits from authors and other rights holders, will help answer in the months ahead.
