OpenAI and Publishers Ask Court to Decide AI Training Fair Use

The publisher lawsuits against OpenAI are now poised for a legal ruling that could shape how AI companies use copyrighted reporting. The parties have filed briefs asking a federal court whether training models on published work qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law.

The cases include claims from The New York Times and Ziff Davis, CNET’s owner. They are advancing after a lengthy discovery process in which separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft were consolidated before one judge. The court could decide key questions before the cases return to their original districts for potential trials.

OpenAI’s defense also turns on how publishers made their sites available. The company says publishers implicitly licensed access when they did not initially block its web scrapers through robots.txt or similar tools. Robots.txt is a website file that tells automated crawlers what they may access.

Many publishers now block bots from OpenAI and other AI firms. OpenAI presents those controls as an available opt-out route; the question before the court is whether the earlier absence of such blocks carries the legal effect the company claims.

Licensing is part of the dispute

The Trump administration has submitted a statement of interest arguing that licensing barriers could burden AI companies. Ziff Davis Chief Executive Vivek Shah disagreed with the premise that licensing would be prohibitively costly, comparing roughly $20 billion in annual payments to news publishers with OpenAI’s stated expectation of spending $750 billion on computing infrastructure by 2030.

Shah called a comparable licensing bill a “rounding error” for AI firms and said greater use of access barriers and paywalls would make information harder to reach. That is Shah’s argument, not a licensing proposal before the court.

The briefs do not resolve the dispute. They put the central disagreement squarely before the court: whether models make a legally distinct use of published work, or whether that use harms the market for the journalism on which they were trained.