Multiple papers owned by Alden Global Capital, the nation’s second-largest newspaper publisher, slammed OpenAI for its recent proposal to the Trump White House to make it easier to use copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models. The papers, in an editorial published Monday, said OpenAI and Google — which also submitted an AI plan to the Trump Administration last week — are seeking a “license to steal” copyrighted material from publishers.
OpenAI, in the plan it shared with the White House last week, said allowing AI models to train based on copyrighted material is necessary to “strengthen America’s lead” against China’s communist government when it comes to AI. Google’s proposal did not mention copyrighted material, but did call for the federal government to “embrace policy frameworks that preserve access to data for fair learning.”
The Alden editorial, which ran in papers like the Boston Herald and Chicago Tribune, said both companies have already been leaching off of the work of news organizations to improve their products.
“OpenAI and Google — having long trained their ravenous bots on the work of newsrooms like this one — now want to throw out long-established copyright law by arguing, we kid you not, that the only way for the United States to defeat the Chinese Communist Party is for those tech giants to steal the content created with the sweat equity of America’s human journalists,” the editorial said.
Last week, OpenAI suggested a “copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security.” Details on what this new framework would look like were not shared.
The company, led by CEO Sam Altman, added that an AI industry built on “democratic principles” would help the U.S. prevail over “CCP-built, autocratic, authoritarian AI.”
On Monday, the Alden editorial mocked that line, saying, “Built on democratic principles? More like built on outright theft.”
OpenAI’s push for AI models to leverage copyrighted materials comes at a time when the debate over how models use humans’ work is hotly contested. The New York Times and New York Daily News are currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using their articles without permission to train ChatGPT; several Alden newspapers have also joined that lawsuit. Media companies like News Corp. and Vox Media, meanwhile, have reached content-sharing deals with OpenAI.
The editorial touched on the lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, saying both companies are “vacuuming up millions of newspaper articles without permission or payment, constituting copyright infringement on a colossal scale.”
“Now OpenAI comes back with the absurd argument that this was somehow necessary for national security,” the editorial added. “The government should reject these self-serving proposals and protect the work of artists, authors, photographers, journalists and all other creators and copyright holders who have been the victims of these companies.”
OpenAI’s proposal was made two months after President Trump said the company, along with Oracle and SoftBank, would invest up to $500 billion in the U.S. government’s AI infrastructure program, dubbed Stargate.
President Trump has previously said it is important for the U.S. to stay ahead of other countries — and in particular, China — when it comes to AI innovation.
“AI is the new oil; it’s the oil of the future,” Trump said during a 2023 speech. “We have to make sure we dominate it.”
But publishers and content creators are aiming to make sure AI dominance includes paying for content used to train AI models. More than 400 Hollywood stars and executives, including Ben Stiller and Aubrey Plaza, feel the same way, with an open letter being sent to the White House this past weekend calling for the Trump Administration to push back against OpenAI and Google’s proposals. The stars argued making it easier to use copyrighted material without consent would “freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries.”
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