News outlets urge court to give little weight to DOJ support for OpenAI in copyright fight

A group of news organizations suing OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement fired back at the Department of Justice this week, telling a Manhattan federal court that the government’s recent backing of the AI company should carry minimal influence in the case.

The publishers’ response, filed around September 21-23, targets a DOJ Statement of Interest submitted on September 1 that sided with OpenAI on a question that could reshape the media industry: whether training large language models on copyrighted content qualifies as fair use.

The DOJ’s uninvited opinion

The DOJ’s filing argued that LLM training on copyrighted works is transformative in nature and serves the public interest, a position that aligns with the Trump administration’s broader push to keep the US competitive in the global AI race.

The plaintiffs contend the DOJ’s brief is a policy statement dressed up as legal analysis. A Statement of Interest, unlike an amicus brief from a party with standing, doesn’t carry binding authority. The news outlets want Judge Sidney H. Stein to treat it as exactly that.

The timing also raised eyebrows among the plaintiff coalition. Filing a government brief in support of a private company mid-litigation struck the publishers as more political positioning than legal reasoning.

Who’s suing and what’s at stake

The New York Times, Seattle Times, and Newsday are among the organizations with active lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies scraped copyrighted articles to train their AI systems without permission or compensation.

OpenAI has consistently maintained that its training practices fall under fair use. The company frames LLM training as transformative because the models don’t reproduce articles verbatim but instead learn patterns and generate new text.

Fair use analysis typically weighs four factors: the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount used, and the effect on the market for the original. The publishers contend that AI-generated summaries and responses directly compete with their content for reader attention, undermining the market value of the original works.

The judge in the middle

Judge Sidney H. Stein is overseeing multidistrict proceedings that consolidate several generative AI training disputes into a single courtroom. His rulings on fair use thresholds could set binding precedent for how copyright law applies to machine learning.

The judge retains full discretion over how much weight to assign the DOJ’s filing. The publishers clearly felt the filing was significant enough to warrant a formal rebuttal, suggesting they view even the appearance of government endorsement as potentially influential.

As of late September 2026, no settlements have been reached in any of the consolidated cases.