Trump Administration Files Brief Backing OpenAI's Fair Use Defense in NYT Copyright Suit

Skynet Chance (+0.02%): Government backing for unrestricted training data access removes a potential legal brake on frontier model scaling and signals that competitiveness concerns outweigh caution in U.S. AI policy. This marginally increases the chance that capable systems are built with fewer external constraints.

Skynet Date (+0 days): Reducing legal uncertainty around training data lets labs continue scaling on the largest available corpora without licensing bottlenecks, modestly accelerating the capability curve. The explicit framing around beating international rivals also nudges development toward speed over deliberation.

AGI Progress (+0.01%): The brief does not advance capabilities directly, but preserving legal access to vast copyrighted corpora protects a key input to the scaling paradigm that current progress depends on. Removing an existential legal threat to that data pipeline is a meaningful, if indirect, tailwind.

AGI Date (+0 days): A favorable fair use environment avoids costly licensing regimes and data restrictions that would have slowed model training cycles, slightly pulling capability timelines forward. Combined with prior pro-AI rulings, the trend keeps data supply from becoming a rate limiter.