U.S. Justice Department Backs Fair Use for AI Training on Copyrighted Works, Alarming Copyright Office

The Department of Justice filed a bombshell Statement of Interest on September 1, 2026, declaring that training large language models on copyrighted text is transformative fair use, upending a years-long copyright dispute and creating unexpected friction within the Trump administration itself. The 20-page filing in consolidated litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York took the government's broadest possible position yet on AI copyright—one that directly contradicts both the White House's own March 2026 National Policy Framework and the Copyright Office's more measured guidance released earlier that year.