Trump Administration Sides With AI Labs Over Copyright Holders, Claiming Training Is Fair Use

The Trump administration has formally weighed in on the high-stakes copyright showdown between creative industries and tech giants, and Washington is backing the algorithms. In an advisory brief filed Tuesday (Sept. 1), the Department of Justice urged a federal judge to rule in favor of OpenAI in its ongoing lawsuit against The New York Times, according to Billboard. The filing marks the federal government’s first official position on the question, asserting that AI companies are broadly protected under the fair use defense when ingesting copyrighted works to train their models. That stance lands with immediate consequence across the music business. Record labels, authors, and visual artists have spent the past two years filing lawsuits to prevent tech labs from treating creative catalogs as uncompensated training data. Major players like Sony Music and Warner Music have already hauled AI firms like Anthropic into court for scraping lyrics and compositions without permission. By framing industrial-scale scraping as fair use, the DOJ is signaling that creator compensation takes a back seat to tech infrastructure. It is a short-sighted position that treats human art as raw fuel for proprietary commercial software. If federal judges adopt the Justice Department's interpretation, the music industry loses its most potent leverage point for forcing tech firms into compulsory licensing agreements. The litigation remains pending, but creators now face an uphill battle against both Silicon Valley and the federal government.