On: Trump administration sides with OpenAI in lawsuit against New York Times

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.