A group of news outlets suing OpenAI for copyright infringement argued Monday that the court should give “little weight” to the views of the Department of Justice (DOJ), which signaled support for the AI firm earlier this month. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and other outlets in the case suggested the administration “may have...
Page A3From§Eachthe late evening edition — 28 September 2026
News outlets sue OpenAI for stealing journalism, ask court to ignore Justice Department calling it fine, twice.
As it ran on the front
The Department of Justice has a copyright unit that spends its days going after people who copy things they should not copy. That is one of its jobs, not the whole of it, but it is the job at issue this week. On September 2, the department filed a brief in The Intercept's lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing the company's use of the outlet's articles was fine.
The plaintiffs noticed. In a filing Monday, they asked the judge to give the department's opinion "little weight." Read that phrase slowly, because it is doing real work: "little weight" is the polite legal term a lawyer reaches for when the honest description would be one government office pleading the case of the party being sued, in two courts, for two sets of plaintiffs, roughly three weeks apart.…
…(cont) Nobody at the department has to explain why. That is the advantage of filing a brief instead of writing a memo: a brief has no motive clause, no gears exposed. All together now — a department whose copyright lawyers exist to police exactly this kind of copying produces, in the same month, one filing that tells one court OpenAI's use of a newsroom's work was fine, and a second filing that shows up to defend the same company when a different newsroom objects. Whatever connects those two briefs lives inside the building. The outlets suing OpenAI only have the outputs, and the outputs are what they asked the judge to discount.
The department's actual reasoning for OpenAI, whatever it is, is not what the newsrooms put in front of the judge. The newsrooms asked for one docket entry: note that this office already told a court, once, that this company's use of a newsroom's work was fine, and weigh the second telling accordingly.
The filing is public. The date is public. The Intercept brief is public. The court will decide how much a government opinion is worth the second time it shows up uninvited on the same side of the same argument. Nothing here required a source who wished to remain anonymous.
“You've got a department whose whole job on paper is chasing down people who steal other people's work, and it's out here filing paperwork for the side accused of stealing the work — twice, in two different courtrooms, for two different newsrooms. That's not a legal opinion, that's a standing order. When the cop and the guy breaking into your house start using the same lawyer, you don't need a conspiracy, you need a lock.”
“Look, the department has an interest in a coherent national policy on AI and innovation, it's not picking sides, it's — okay, it picked the same side twice, but consistency is a virtue, isn't it? An agency is allowed to have one opinion about one company across multiple lawsuits, that's not favoritism, that's just — huh. Did I say that? That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
· Trump Admin Tells Court: Let OpenAI Rip Off The Intercept’s Articles from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.