US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material
- ID
- 20768
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 03 Sep 2026, 1:09 AM
- Fetched
- 03 Sep 2026, 1:33 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/02/u-s-government-sides-with-openai-on-issue-of-training-llms-on-copyrighted-material/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 03 Sep 2026, 1:33 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_ml_learnerssaas_foundersdevelopers
What happened
The Trump administration filed a 20-page brief defending OpenAI's unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train LLMs in the NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit, arguing that constraining LLM development under fair use doctrine would hinder American AI leadership. The brief references an executive order Trump signed last year. So far, AI training copyright cases have largely favored AI companies — Judge William Alsup ordered Anthropic to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to writers, but not for the training itself.
Why it matters
If US courts continue ruling that training on copyrighted material is fair use, the models Malaysian builders depend on (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will keep being trained on broad corpora without licensing restrictions — but it also means any Malaysian startup training its own models on copyrighted data faces an unsettled legal landscape, since Malaysian copyright law is separate from US fair use doctrine. Founders shipping AI products should not assume US rulings protect them locally.
Discussion angle
What does this mean for Malaysian startups that fine-tune or train models on copyrighted content — does US precedent create a false sense of safety when local copyright law hasn't been tested on AI training?