On: 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.