Trump administration sides with OpenAI in lawsuit against New York Times

4 September 2026

The government has filed its brief on the side of the machine-builders against the printers of news, and I confess my first reaction was not philosophical but forensic: follow the money, then follow the veto.

The Times holds property - articles, paid for by subscribers, produced by writers whose wages the paper must meet. OpenAI has taken that property without purchase, converted it into a product, and sold access to it. Call this training, call it learning, call it what you please; the balance sheet does not change. Value flowed in one direction, and no invoice was issued. Now the executive branch, whose proper office is to enforce the laws Congress wrote rather than to pick favorites among litigants, has declared its preference. This is the mechanism speaking, not the mission. An administration that sides with the party whose fortunes align with its own politics is not interpreting copyright; it is spending it.

It will be objected that the public interest favors cheap intelligence, that knowledge once freed benefits all. The objection has force only if the freed knowledge actually reaches the public rather than pooling inside a corporation’s walled garden. What is taken from many publishers is consolidated into one product, priced and gated. That is not the commons. That is a monopoly built on requisitioned materials - a fortification assembled from stones looted from other men’s walls.

And observe the precedent being manufactured. If the executive may bless one class of takers by fiat, the rule becomes whatever the sitting power finds convenient. Today it favors the builders; tomorrow, when the politics reverse, it will favor the publishers, and no stable doctrine will survive either turn. Property needs a referee bound by rules, not a patron dispensing favors.

I have seen governments pick winners before. The winners were always the government’s friends.

4 September 2026

The government has filed its opinion in the matter of the stolen work. It sides with the takers.

Consider what happened. The New York Times assembled millions of articles - reported, verified, edited, paid for. Reporters went to courthouse steps and hospital bedsides and flood zones. The articles were taken without permission, without payment, without notice, and fed to a machine that now answers questions with their substance. The Times sued. Other papers joined. And the administration of this country responded: not to the theft, but to the convenience of it. The taking, they say, is progress. Progress requires raw material. The Times is raw material.

Note the pretext. It is not “we did not take the work.” It is “the taking serves a greater purpose.” I have read this argument before, in older ledgers. When the pretext is prosperity, the victims are always the same people whose property requires no negotiation - because the courts have already decided their claims are obstacles.

Follow the money, as always. Microsoft funds the machine. Microsoft is named in the suit. The government that regulates Microsoft has entered the case on Microsoft’s side. Write those three facts in a column and see what they add up to.

What galls me most is the language of inevitability. “Fair use,” they call it - as if fairness were something the stronger party defines after the goods are gone. The reporter’s labor becomes substrate. The newsroom becomes an ore deposit. No name attached, no byline, no wage.

I spent my life insisting that the record be kept: who took what, from whom, when, under what justification. This suit is a record-keeping dispute at its heart - a fight over whether the people who make the record own it. The administration has answered. The answer is no.

Put the names down anyway. The paper’s name. The writers’ names. The date of the filing. The record outlasts the administration. It always has.

Well, the government has stepped into this fight between the newspaper fellas and the thinking machines, and it come down on the side of the machines. Seems the machines have been helping themselves to fifty years of other people’s writing without so much as a thank-you note, and Washington’s official position is that this is just fine.

Now I don’t know much about the law, but I know a little about ranching. If I drove my herd onto a neighbor’s range and let ’em eat his hay, I’d find out real quick what he thought about “fair use.” He’d be at my fence before the second cow finished chewing. And if I told him the hay was going to make smarter cattle, so really everybody wins - why, he’d still want his hay paid for, only now at a higher price on account of the speech.

The funny part is who’s doing the arguing. The same crowd that hollers loudest about property rights and protecting what a man earns looked at a newspaper’s property and said, well, that’s different, that’s just words laying around. A man’s cattle is sacred, but a man’s sentences, them’s free-range.

And the newspapers ain’t exactly innocent lambs in the pasture either. Half of ’em spent twenty years giving their stories away online to beat the other fella, and now they’re shocked somebody took ’em up on it. You leave your gate open long enough, don’t act surprised when the whole county grazes there.

I reckon the lawyers will be the only ones who get fat off this one, same as always. Both sides will plead poverty while the meter runs, and the judge will retire early on the proceedings.

Me, I just figure if a thing is worth taking, it’s worth paying for. But then, I’m just a dumb cowpoke, and what do I know about the new economics.

Not much, evidently. Same as everybody in Washington.