DOJ Tells A Court AI Training Is Fair Use. Publishers Fire Back

The New York Times and the other news organisations suing OpenAI are asking U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York to give "little weight" to the Department of Justice's statement of interest that training large language models on copyrighted material is fair use. The publishers argue the Justice Department "favors the AI industry at the expense of news publishers and other content creators," and that the government's position "will decimate newsrooms." Axios adds the sharper angle: the filing "may have been influenced by extraneous considerations, up to and including the Administration's political and financial interests," pointing to donations from AI executives. The DOJ's own argument was that "constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress," and that requiring licences would impede America's ability to compete with China. The publishers' rebuttal is blunt: "Licensing fees are not barriers to entry into the AI industry in any meaningful sense," naming Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Apple and Amazon as companies for whom "the funds to pay copyright owners for their content are readily available." Axios also surfaced an unsealed discovery admission in which a Microsoft director of applied science warned the company's AI content strategy had created a "doom loop" that would hurt both the LLMs and the entire web.

The crux

The U.S. government has formally sided with AI companies on the question of whether training models on journalism is fair use, and if that view holds, the whole publisher licensing revenue line that the industry has spent two years building collapses with it.

Sell-side read

This is not an academic fair-use dispute. It decides whether your archive is a revenue line or a free training set. If the court leans the DOJ's way, every publisher without a signed deal loses their licensing leverage overnight, and the only survivors are the handful that already negotiated.

Watch

Judge Stein's treatment of the DOJ statement, and whether the "doom loop" discovery admission emboldens more publishers to file rather than settle.