US Justice Department backs AI companies in New York Times copyright case

The US Justice Department has backed AI companies in a copyright dispute brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft.

In a filing submitted to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the department asked the court to reject the Times’ argument that using its content to train large language models breached copyright law.

The case concerns AI companies that trained their systems on millions of articles from The New York Times. The department’s position supports the companies’ fair-use argument in the ongoing lawsuit.