# US Justice Department Backs AI Training as Fair Use

> The US Justice Department has waded into the biggest copyright fight in AI, filing a statement of interest that argues training large language models on copyrighted text is exceedingly transformative and therefore lawful fair use. The filing lands in the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, just days before both sides file summary judgment motions. What makes this striking is the framing. Alongside the usual fair-use reasoning, the government leaned on national security, arguing that American AI dominance is too important to be undercut by what one associate attorney general called misinterpretations of copyright. In other words, the administration is treating training data as a strategic asset, not just a legal question. The stakes are enormous. If courts accept the transformative-use argument, the industry gets something close to a green light to keep training on the open web. If they do not, publishers gain real leverage over how their work is used. A statement of interest is not binding, but having the federal government put its thumb on the scale, and on the labs' side, could shape how judges read the law for years.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechXplore · Published Friday, September 4, 2026_

## Wortins' read

The US Justice Department has waded into the biggest copyright fight in AI, filing a statement of interest that argues training large language models on copyrighted text is exceedingly transformative and therefore lawful fair use. The filing lands in the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, just days before both sides file summary judgment motions. What makes this striking is the framing. Alongside the usual fair-use reasoning, the government leaned on national security, arguing that American AI dominance is too important to be undercut by what one associate attorney general called misinterpretations of copyright. In other words, the administration is treating training data as a strategic asset, not just a legal question. The stakes are enormous. If courts accept the transformative-use argument, the industry gets something close to a green light to keep training on the open web. If they do not, publishers gain real leverage over how their work is used. A statement of interest is not binding, but having the federal government put its thumb on the scale, and on the labs' side, could shape how judges read the law for years.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechXplore](https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-sides-openai-york-copyright-lawsuit.html)

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