HASSAN ALI KANU, Politico; News publishers accuse Trump admin of bias toward AI companies in copyright suit

The Justice Department earlier this month filed a statement in court supporting OpenAI’s defense in the publishers' copyright lawsuit.

"Lawyers for The New York Times and other major publishers on Monday asked a federal court to disregard the Justice Department’s efforts to get involved in their lawsuit against OpenAI, saying the Trump administration may simply be biased in the company’s favor.

The publishers are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The Justice Department earlier this month filed a statement supporting OpenAI’s defense in the case, arguing that copying others’ content without permission in order to train large language models is protected under the “fair use” doctrine.

The newspapers on Monday responded that DOJ had discounted the Copyright Office’s contrary conclusion on fair use and AI, and noting that the government is seeking to weigh in at an especially early stage of the case.

“That the DOJ fails to acknowledge any possible contrary views, and dismisses the Copyright Office’s comprehensive study in a footnote, suggests that the DOJ may have been influenced by extraneous considerations — up to and including the Administration’s political and financial interests,” lawyers for the publishers wrote. “Although one could argue that political factors will always influence Government litigation positions to some extent, the nature, extent, and transparency of the AI industry’s efforts to influence this Administration should not be lightly dismissed.”...

The plaintiffs include The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers, as well as a group of authors that includes Sylvia Day, John Grisham and George R. R. Martin."

Why the DOJ’s OpenAI copyright stance is the real threat to national security; ZDNET, September 15, 2026

 David Gewirtz, ZDNET; Why the DOJ’s OpenAI copyright stance is the real threat to national security

The DOJ argues that AI training is transformative fair use, but publishers say unlicensed scraping threatens their survival. This copyright fight could shape the future of online knowledge.

"Ever since generative AI arrived in early 2023, we’ve seen that its almost unlimited base of knowledge is due to how the big AI companies trained their models. To a large degree, AI models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic have been trained on anything they could ingest, including nearly all the copyrighted material on the web.

The AI companies are even reported to be buying up physical books by the millions, cutting them apart, scanning them in, and then disposing of the remains. For example, based on a search of the Anthropic settlement database, I know the company scanned my book, The Flexible Enterprise, and included it in the Claude corpus. I was never asked for permission. I don’t even get a free Claude account.

Due to the bulk ingestion of intellectual property, many companies filed suit against the AI companies. One such company is Ziff Davis, the owner of ZDNET. Disclosure: Ziff is also the company that pays me each week for my writing here.

Two weeks ago, on Sept. 1, 2026, the US Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the case is being litigated. What makes this statement particularly interesting is that the DOJ is not one of the parties in the case. The government is putting its thumb on the scale, weighing in on a lawsuit between private parties.

On Monday, Fortune published a commentary by Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, regarding the Justice Department’s unusual intervention in the case. In this article, I’ll briefly summarize the DOJ’s statement, then discuss Shah’s premise, and then pick up and expand upon it with some of my own thoughts."