Nadler, Raskin and Johnson challenge DOJ’s national-security case for AI training

Three House lawmakers asked a federal court on October 30, 2026, to reject national security as a justification for AI companies’ uncompensated use of copyrighted work. Representatives Jerrold Nadler, Jamie Raskin and Hank Johnson argue that the Justice Department is asking judges to recognize a copyright exception that Congress never enacted.

Their amicus brief was submitted in the Southern District of New York in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation. It responds directly to DOJ’s support for AI companies’ use of copyrighted material, including New York Times journalism, without compensation.

The copyright test they want preserved

The legal mechanism at issue is fair use: rules that allow some uses of copyrighted material without the owner’s permission. That assessment considers the circumstances of the copying, including how the work was used, how much was copied and whether the use harms the market for the original work.

The lawmakers’ objection is that national security does not belong in that test. They argue that the Copyright Act contains no national-security exception allowing private companies free and unrestricted use of protected material. Treating national security as a fair-use consideration, they contend, would add a rule that lawmakers did not put into the statute.

National security is not a fair use factor under the Copyright Act.

Representatives Jerrold Nadler, Jamie Raskin and Hank Johnson, in their amicus brief

AI development and the market for journalism

DOJ entered the dispute on September 1 in support of the AI companies. According to Nadler’s office, the department argued that restricting their use of copyrighted texts would threaten American AI development and national security. That is the government rationale the October 30 filing asks the court to reject.

The underlying dispute concerns allegations that OpenAI and Microsoft used New York Times journalism without permission to build AI products that compete with the newspaper. Those allegations connect the training material to the business that produced it: the claimed harm involves not only copying articles, but using them to develop competing products.

The lawmakers frame their intervention around compensation for the people whose work supplies AI training material. They urge the court to preserve copyright protections for writers, journalists and artists. Their stated concern is that DOJ’s approach would replace an assessment of how copyrighted work was used—and its market effects—with special treatment for AI companies based on national-security claims.