The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab, according to The Verge. The move places the federal government on the side of the technology company in a closely watched legal battle over how artificial intelligence systems are trained.

The lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleges that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times. The Times is seeking to recoup “billions of dollars” in damages, according to The Verge.

The Guardian reports that the administration is arguing in favor of the use of copyrighted writing to train artificial intelligence. The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot.

The case is not limited to a single publisher. According to The Guardian, other newspapers have joined in the suit, which was first filed in 2023, broadening the dispute into a wider confrontation between news organizations and AI developers.

At the center of the case is the question of whether training AI models on copyrighted material without compensation is permissible. The Times contends its material was misused without permission, while the administration’s intervention supports the practice of using such content for AI training.

The outcome of the litigation could carry significant weight for both the news industry and the AI sector, given the scale of the damages sought and the number of publishers now involved.