• by Wendy Davis , September 29, 2026

News organizations suing OpenAI are urging a federal judge to give "little weight" to the Department of Justice's opinion that training large language models on copyrighted material is a fair use.

The Justice Department "favors the AI industry at the expense of news publishers and other content creators," The New York Times and other newspapers argue, using an acronym for artificial intelligence.

The organizations add in papers filed Monday with U.S. District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York that the government's position "will decimate newsrooms."

"What happens then?" they write. "What happens when all the trained journalists are out of jobs? Who gets to report on the news?"

The new papers come in a battle that began in 2023, when the Times (later joined by other news organizations) alleged that OpenAI infringed copyright in several ways -- including by using newspaper articles to train chatbots, and by displaying large portions of articles verbatim in responses to queries.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice argued in a "statement of interest" that an artificial intelligence company's ingestion of articles for training purposes is the type of transformative activity that's protected by fair use concepts.

"The purpose of the copying (to build an intelligent, interactive model) differs in kind from the purpose of the copied work (to use language to directly entertain or educate a reading audience)," the Justice Department argued.

"LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs," the government argued, using an acronym for large language models.

"Constraining LLM development under a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine would thwart such creative and scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility," the Justice Department added.

The Times and others counter that requiring companies to pay licensing fees to copyright owners would not hinder the development of artificial intelligence.

"Licensing fees are not barriers to entry into the AI industry in any meaningful sense," the news organizations argue.

"Current AI model developers include some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Apple, and Amazon," they add. "The funds to pay copyright owners for their content are readily available to all of these companies."