@techreport{usdojstatementofinterestllmtrainingfairuse2026,
  title = {Statement of Interest of the United States on fair use in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation (S.D.N.Y., 1 September 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  institution = {United States Department of Justice},
  url = {https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396/gov.uscourts.nysd.640396.1682.0.pdf},
  abstract = {On 1 September 2026 the United States filed a 20-page Statement of Interest in the consolidated copyright cases against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York (25-md-3143, Document 316 in the lead member case, signed by the Associate Attorney General and the head of the Civil Division). Appearing under 28 U.S.C. 517, the government says it "has a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law", argues that "the use of copies to train LLMs is extraordinarily transformative", and frames the stakes as competitiveness and national security: rules that hamper US AI development "threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries who are not so encumbered". It is explicit about what it does not decide. The government "focuses on the question whether the use of copyrighted works at the training stage" is fair use, concedes that "at the output (rather than training) stage, certain uses may not be transformative if the LLM reconstructs and disseminates an original copyrighted work", and takes no position on how the works were obtained. For animation education the document matters as the first formal executive-branch position on the question that Andersen v. Stability AI and the studios' case against Midjourney turn on, even though it concerns written works and language models rather than images or video.},
  keywords = {ip-and-copyright, training-data, fair-use, litigation, generative-ai},
  note = {AI \& Animation Education Knowledge Base}
}