AI Rights Project seeks to weigh in on OpenAI copyright case

The AI Rights Project asked a federal court for permission to file an amicus brief in the OpenAI copyright multidistrict litigation, arguing the case raises unanswered questions about fair use, human creativity and whether Congress, not courts, should reshape copyright law for AI training. The filing comes after a U.S. Statement of Interest backed the legality of training large language models on copyrighted texts.

Why it matters: - The filing pushes the court to confront whether copyright fair use depends on human creative judgment when applied to AI training. - The motion also asks whether any major expansion of fair use for AI should come from Congress instead of the courts. - The case sits inside one of the most consequential copyright fights over generative AI training.

What happened: - The AI Rights Project moved yesterday for leave to file an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 1:25-md-03143 (S.D.N.Y.) (Dkt. 2099). - The motion follows a Sept. 1, 2026 Statement of Interest from the United States that said the government has “a strong interest in this Court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” citing “America’s global AI dominance” and national security. - The Project said its filing raises two questions the parties’ summary judgment briefing does not present.

The details: - The first question focuses on the fair use premise in Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, one of two 2025 Northern District of California decisions holding that training a large language model on copyrighted books is fair use. - The brief points to Bartz language describing training as “the iterative, trial-and-error discovery of contingent statistical relationships between each word fragment and all other word fragments” and also as “[l]ike any reader aspiring to be a writer.” - The brief argues that transformative use has always assumed human creative judgment. - The brief says neither Bartz nor the other decision examined whether the human-reader analogy holds in the AI-training context. - The brief also cites Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025), for the proposition that the Copyright Act requires a human author. - The second question concerns the Intellectual Property Clause, which gives Congress power “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” - The brief argues the Clause states both the objective and the means for achieving it. - The brief says recalibrating that balance belongs to Congress, not the courts. - The brief cites Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 212 (2003), for the proposition that it is “generally for Congress, not the courts, to decide how best to pursue the Copyright Clause’s objectives.” - The Project says the brief proposes no answer to the fair use question and urges no outcome. - The filing includes a Statement of Non-Position covering issues it does not address, including the policy arguments in the Statement of Interest.

Between the lines: - The motion is not a direct attack on AI training as a practice. - Instead, it tries to narrow the court’s role and shift the broader policy fight to lawmakers. - That approach aligns with a legal strategy that treats AI copyright disputes as constitutional and institutional questions, not just technical fair use questions. - The Project says the work applies its Human Baseline Principle to precedent-setting AI litigation. - The AI Rights Project previously moved for leave to file a related brief in In re Mosaic LLM Litigation, No. 3:24-cv-01451-CRB (N.D. Cal.) (Dkt. 420), and that motion remains pending. - The Project says it has no stake in which party prevails and accepts no funding from major AI developers whose systems its work addresses.

What's next: - The New York court will decide whether to grant leave for the amicus filing in the OpenAI MDL. - The broader copyright fight over AI training will continue across parallel cases, including the pending Mosaic motion in California. - The Project’s full brief and amicus program are available here.

The bottom line: - The AI Rights Project is trying to reframe the OpenAI copyright MDL as a question about human authorship, judicial limits and congressional power over AI-era copyright policy.