David Gewirtz, ZDNET; Why the DOJ’s OpenAI copyright stance is the real threat to national security
The DOJ argues that AI training is transformative fair use, but publishers say unlicensed scraping threatens their survival. This copyright fight could shape the future of online knowledge.
"Ever since generative AI arrived in early 2023, we’ve seen that its almost unlimited base of knowledge is due to how the big AI companies trained their models. To a large degree, AI models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic have been trained on anything they could ingest, including nearly all the copyrighted material on the web.
The AI companies are even reported to be buying up physical books by the millions, cutting them apart, scanning them in, and then disposing of the remains. For example, based on a search of the Anthropic settlement database, I know the company scanned my book, The Flexible Enterprise, and included it in the Claude corpus. I was never asked for permission. I don’t even get a free Claude account.
Due to the bulk ingestion of intellectual property, many companies filed suit against the AI companies. One such company is Ziff Davis, the owner of ZDNET. Disclosure: Ziff is also the company that pays me each week for my writing here.
Two weeks ago, on Sept. 1, 2026, the US Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the case is being litigated. What makes this statement particularly interesting is that the DOJ is not one of the parties in the case. The government is putting its thumb on the scale, weighing in on a lawsuit between private parties.
On Monday, Fortune published a commentary by Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, regarding the Justice Department’s unusual intervention in the case. In this article, I’ll briefly summarize the DOJ’s statement, then discuss Shah’s premise, and then pick up and expand upon it with some of my own thoughts."
