US government backs OpenAI in copyright fair-use defense

The Trump administration's brief doesn't just favor OpenAI in one lawsuit. It effectively signals that federal policy will treat fair use as the default legal posture for LLM training, which is a thumb on the scale that benefits incumbents who built their model weights before any licensing regime existed.

This sits in direct tension with what we covered yesterday from The Verge: Google is already negotiating direct licensing deals with Hollywood studios, betting that explicit permissions will become the industry standard regardless of how the NYT case resolves. If the government's fair use position holds in court, Google's licensing strategy looks expensive and unnecessary in hindsight. If it doesn't, Google will have bought an early-mover advantage that OpenAI, now relying on litigation outcomes, will have to scramble to replicate. Either way, the two largest frontier labs are placing opposite bets on the same foundational question, and the NYT ruling will determine which posture the rest of the industry converges on.

Watch whether Google accelerates or pauses its studio licensing negotiations in the next 60 days. A slowdown would signal internal confidence that the government brief shifts the legal calculus enough to make licensing unnecessary. Continued deal-making would suggest Google sees the fair use argument as too fragile to rely on.