Conservative groups are urging a Manhattan federal court not to allow AI giants to ‘recklessly crawl the internet’ without compensating news outlets and other content providers — warning that it could create an information monopoly and even jeopardize national security, The Post has learned.
The Center for American Rights, a right-leaning nonprofit law firm focused on tech and telecom policy, outlined its argument in an amicus brief submitted in the sweeping copyright infringement lawsuit that pits Sam Altman’s OpenAI against a coalition of news outlets.
“If [superintelligence] is permitted to recklessly crawl the internet, even past paywalls, then we’ve effectively stripped these smaller companies of their competitive advantage and, worse, permanently solidified these SI companies as the ultimate distributors of our information,” the brief says.
“This completely expurgates the incentive for any creator to want to provide free, open content and solidifies SI companies as our sole provider of news and entertainment,” the brief adds.
“That is a terrifying prospect and completely at odds with the Trump Administration’s goals of protecting copyright and a diversity of viewpoints (given Big Tech’s track record of removing politically disfavored content).”
Plaintiffs, including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, accuse OpenAI of stealing content without proper credit or compensation to train its AI models. OpenAI’s lawyers argue that usage of the copyrighted material is protected under “fair use” doctrine.”
The brief’s cosigners include the Article III Project and the Internet Accountability Project, which are both led by Mike Davis, an influential lawyer known to have the ear of President Trump; the Bull Moose Project; Consumers For A Strong Economy; and conservative lawyer Joel Thayer.
The Post has reached out to OpenAI for comment.
The brief argues that OpenAI’s interpretation of copyright law would make it even easier for Chinese firms to rip off American IP through “distillation” attacks — where an advanced AI model is used to train a less capable one without permission and at a fraction of the cost and time.
Both OpenAI and rival Anthropic have accused Chinese firms like Z.AI and DeepSeek of using illegal distillation to build advanced models at a fraction of the cost and time of US competitors.
“If the Court here agrees with OpenAI’s expansive view of fair use, it would not only encourage foreign adversaries to continue this obvious form of IP theft but also give them legal immunity to do so,” the brief says.
The Times first sued OpenAI and key investor Microsoft in December 2023, alleging in Manhattan federal court that the ChatGPT creator had used “millions” of its copyrighted articles to build AI products that directly compete with the newspaper.
The lawsuit was later consolidated with similar lawsuits brought by other plaintiffs, including “Game of Thrones” creator George R.R. Martin, comedian Sarah Silverman and the New York Daily News. Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected a bid by OpenAI to dismiss the lawsuit in March 2025, but has so far declined to rule on the “fair use” argument.
Meanwhile, OpenAI gained a supporter last month in the form of President Trump’s Justice Department, which argued in a court filing that using copyrighted content to train AI models does not violate the law.
The DOJ argued that a ruling against OpenAI “would hamper competition in the market for LLMs, because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees.”
As The Post reported, the DOJ’s filing surprised may tech policy experts as it seemed to contradict the Trump administration’s own AI policy framework, released in March, which called on Congress to consider implementing agreements that would require AI firms to fairly compensate media firms for their articles.
Indeed, Axios reported that the DOJ’s filing that “surprised critical agencies,” including the US Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office.
The cosigners of this week’s amicus brief express support for the Trump administration’s “vision for a dominant American future powered by Super Intelligence (SI)” – and they argue that strong copyright protections will help achieve that vision rather than hinder innovation at US firms.
“Our goal with the brief is simple – to demonstrate that an America First legal and policy approach values both SI acceleration and IP protection,” the brief’s author, Center For American Rights President Daniel Suhr, told The Post.
“Especially at a time of rampant AI tech theft by China, America First means protecting our innovative edge through real respect for IP.”
Trump administration officials have publicly signaled they are concerned about the threat of distillation by China and other foreign adversaries.
In April, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology published a memo accusing “foreign entities, principally based in China” of engaging in “deliberate, industrial-scale” theft campaigns.
Pre-trial filings have already contained some bombshell revelations showing that executives at Microsoft and OpenAI privately fretted at copyright infringement.
One Microsoft director even worried that the tech firms were committing potentially the “largest theft of labor in human history” to train their AI models, according to documents unsealed last month.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the director’s comments “reflect one employee’s individual perspective, are not a legal analysis, and do not represent the company’s views.”
“Microsoft’s position is set out in its court filings, which explain why these transformative uses are consistent with copyright law and why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism,” the spokesperson added.
