The Trump Department of Justice submitted a court filing arguing that artificial intelligence can legally train from copyrighted content.
“It is not in the public’s interest for the largest technology companies to have an oligopoly on LLM [Large Language Model] training due to licensing entry barriers that function primarily as large subsidies for old mainstream media companies,” the DOJ’s filing read. “[T]he United States has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law.”
“An OpenAI LLM thus uses the copyrighted work not to duplicate the work’s expressive content, but as part of a process to learn and act on statistical patterns in written text, including vocabulary, syntax, and knowledge,” the DOJ explained. “The purpose of the copying (to build an intelligent, interactive model) differs in kind from the purpose of the copied work.”
The filing goes on to argue that “training does not reveal anything to the public at all—it simply creates a copy of a protected work in order to teach an LLM to recognize relationships between data and adapt to new information.”
“The potential for future outputs that might cause market harm is simply not relevant to evaluating an LLM training use under the required use-by-use analysis,” the DOJ wrote.
“[President Trump] has made clear that AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans,” Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. wrote on social media. “This Administration will never let our Nation be at a disadvantage relative to our foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law.”
The White House released what it called its AI framework earlier this year. According to the framework, the national standard “should respect key principles of federalism.” It will not preempt the “traditional police powers retained by the states to enforce laws of general applicability against AI developers and users, including particular laws to protect children, prevent fraud, and protect consumers.”
The framework adds that individual states “should not be permitted to regulate AI development, because it is an inherently interstate phenomenon with key foreign policy and national security implications.”
