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OpenAI published a page on October 30, 2026, coinciding with the court deadline for amicus brief submissions, presenting excerpts from briefs filed by third parties in support of its position in the New York Times lawsuit. The page, titled “Fair use benefits everyone,” curates statements from medical researchers, disability advocates, librarians, academic economists, and startup founders, presenting them as evidence that restricting AI training on copyrighted text would carry broad societal costs beyond the AI companies directly sued.

The page is explicitly positioned against the Times lawsuit. OpenAI describes the case as asking courts to ignore “a half century of legal history and progress, and toss aside the longstanding principle of fair use in their own narrow pursuit of an undeserved payday.”

The Brief Coalition

The third-party voices OpenAI has selected span a range of fields and interests:

Disability and access organizations: The American Council of the Blind, Association of Research Libraries, American Library Association, Consumer Technology Association, and Business Software Alliance filed jointly, arguing that restricting AI training would harm medical researchers, students with learning differences, people with disabilities, farmers, independent creators, and open-source AI developers.

Authors Alliance: Argued that the Times’ market dilution theory asks copyright to protect against economic competition from non-infringing outputs, which copyright has historically not covered. The submission asks the court to reject “market dilution” (competitive pressure from non-substitute content) as cognizable harm under 17 U.S.C. § 107(4).

Engine and Developers Alliance: Argued that foundation model training does not reproduce training works; it builds a general-purpose tool that others adapt. The purpose of training and the purpose of training works are not the same.

Foundation for American Innovation: Made a national security argument: AI capabilities built through training deliver analysis, software, and other productive work that bears on fair use factor four’s assessment of market effects.

Economist Joshua Gans: Argued that a rule treating every displaced sale as actionable market harm “can weaken the second [incentive, to build learning tools] without reliably protecting the first [incentive to create content].”

Author Kevin Kelly: Said a ruling for plaintiffs would grant copyright holders “far more than the limited monopoly to their original expression Congress” intended, and that AI models represent new creative media, not substitutes for existing works.

Why It Matters

The NYT case is the highest-profile active copyright litigation in AI. Previous months brought damaging pretrial disclosures: internal memos showing OpenAI executives acknowledged LibGen training raised legal questions, and Microsoft documents in which an executive described AI training data acquisition as “the largest theft of labor in human history.” The Anthropic author settlement in July 2026 established that large-scale book ingestion without a license can constitute infringement even where training itself might be fair use.

OpenAI’s brief page is a counter-narrative campaign ahead of court proceedings, assembling a coalition of voices arguing the social costs of a ruling against fair use in AI training. The page is public-facing, not a court filing: it is an attempt to shift the wider discourse before a precedent-setting decision that would affect the entire AI industry’s training data practices.

The full amicus filings are available on the public court docket.