“Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States … threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered,” the Justice Department wrote in its brief.
The Trump administration is lending its support to OpenAI in a lawsuit against the New York Times, arguing that artificial intelligence companies are entitled to use copyright-protected material in the training of their large language models.
According to The Guardian, the Times accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of copyright-protected newspaper articles without permission to assist in the development and training of ChatGPT. In a brief submitted to a Manhattan-based federal court on Tuesday, the Trump administration weighed in for the first time, opining that AI is critical to the United States’ economic and national-security interests.
“Rules of law that make it significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry in the United States … threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered,” the Justice Department wrote in its brief.
“The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally,” the administration said. “As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence.’”
Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, including ChatGPT and its competitors, are a form of large language model. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on large bodies of text, sometimes constituting billions of lines. They do not constitute true artificial intelligence, instead using series of “tokens” to predict which words make the most sense in relation to a user’s query or prompt.
In a social media statement, Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., said that the administration will continue to leverage all the resources at its disposal to advocate on behalf of multibillion-dollar AI companies.
“AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans,” Woodward wrote on Twitter. “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.”
In response to the administration’s intervention, the New York Times said that the government is casting its lot with companies that, in effect, profit off theft.
“The Administration is standing with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole,” NYT spokesperson Graham James said.
“Both AI and creators can thrive—AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible, as copyright law requires,” James added. “The Administration’s proposal to let companies take that content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created content that a healthy society depends on, and which AI needs to function.”
Sources
Trump administration backs OpenAI in newspapers’ copyright case
Trump administration sides with OpenAI in lawsuit against New York Times
Trump’s DoJ Backs OpenAI In Legal Face Off With New York Times
