When the US Justice Department took OpenAI and Microsoft’s side in the New York Times copyright case, two agencies you would normally ask about such a question were caught off guard: the Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office. Axios reports this citing sources; both agencies declined to comment.
What the filing does
The department filed a statement of interest. That is how the government declares an official position in a private lawsuit. It binds nobody, but it carries weight: judges read these, and they move what counts as a defensible reading of the law.
On substance, the department argues that training large language models on protected works is fair use because the practice is new and transformative. It pointedly does not extend that reasoning to model outputs. I wrote about the position itself at the start of September — what is new is how it came about.
Why this is more than a footnote
The Copyright Office is the expert agency for exactly this question, and the Patent Office sits in the same field. If both learn from the press what their government is arguing in court, then that argument is not an agency view. It is a political decision made without the specialists.
Vivek Shah, CEO of media company Ziff Davis, calls the reasoning muddled: the department claims enforcing licences would be burdensome, while never taking a position on whether a licensing regime is workable at all.
Two agencies you would normally ask
The outcome matters to Anthropic too. The same fair use question runs through the suits against every major lab, and whatever Judge Stein decides in Manhattan will be read across the industry. Government backing helps them.
That help gets weaker the clearer it becomes how thin the expert backing is. A filing the responsible offices had not seen can be treated by a court as what it then is: one administration’s opinion, not the assessment of its own agencies. Leaning on it means leaning on less than the headline promises.