Punch Newspapers’ report that “the US” has sided with OpenAI in the New York Times’ copyright suit is, as published, a headline without a filing to point to — no agency is named, no brief is cited, and no independent outlet had corroborated it as of September 3, 2026. That matters because the underlying dispute, the Times’ suit alleging that OpenAI trained its models on copyrighted news content without a license, is one of the most closely watched tests of fair-use doctrine in the generative-AI era, and a formal US government position — whether from the Justice Department, the Copyright Office, or another body — would be read by every publisher and AI lab as a signal on how Washington views training-data scraping.
If the government has weighed in on the government’s substance rather than just its posture, that alone would move markets for licensed content deals faster than any court ruling has so far. Data licensing shops, news publishers negotiating their own AI deals, and scraping defendants in parallel suits will all want to know exactly what was filed and by whom before treating this as precedent. Until a docket entry, agency statement, or a second outlet’s reporting surfaces, this should be treated as an unconfirmed claim worth tracking rather than a settled development — data industry readers should watch for the actual filing before adjusting any licensing or litigation strategy.
US sides with OpenAI in New York Times copyright lawsuit
