US Justice Department sides with OpenAI in New York Times dispute: training SI on others' texts is "fair use"
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
The government has said outright for the first time that learning from everything people have written is fine for SI. If the courts listen, machines will keep access to the main fuel of their growth: human knowledge.
The Department of Justice filed a 20-page "statement of interest" in Manhattan federal court in the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Its position: training language models on copyrighted texts is generally fair use, because the model learns generalized skills rather than copying works; in the department's view, mandatory licensing would slow science, harm US competitiveness and leave the market to big players alone. This is the federal government's first intervention in the wave of SI training lawsuits; the document does not bind the court but sets out an official position. The NYT said the administration had sided with "a handful of trillion-dollar companies" against authors.