House Democrats Criticize Justice Dept. Support of OpenAI in Copyright Suit

Top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee said on Friday that the Justice Department had overstepped its authority and made a flawed legal argument in its support of OpenAI in a landmark copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times and other publishers.

In a filing in federal court in Manhattan, the lawmakers also signaled that if the Democrats retook the House in elections on Tuesday, the chamber was likely to shift away from its largely hands-off approach to artificial intelligence companies.

In early September, the Justice Department argued in a court filing that using articles from The Times and other written works to train A.I. systems sufficiently transformed them into new material, which copyright law allows. And it made a broader case that developing A.I. was critical to national security and outweighed potential harms.

But the Democrats said that when Congress passed the copyright law in 1976, it did not include an exception for national security or give the Justice Department authority to assert specific or broad national security exceptions.

The three lawmakers — Representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Hank Johnson of Georgia — called the Justice Department’s argument “a bulldozer that would eliminate copyright protection with respect to A.I. training for all works in all circumstances.”

The Justice Department declined to comment beyond its filing last month.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Microsoft, OpenAI’s partner and co-defendant in The Times’s lawsuit, declined comment.