Story Commentary · September 3, 2026
Government Warns Only Big Tech Could Afford Licensing — In Brief Defending Big Tech
Trump's Justice Department filed a legal brief supporting OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit brought by The Intercept and other media companies, arguing that requiring licensing fees for AI training would unfairly benefit only the largest technology companies.
Wait, so the government says OpenAI needs everyone's articles for free because paying for them would only let "the largest technology companies" afford it? But OpenAI is valued at over $150 billion and Microsoft is one of the largest technology companies in the world. And they're filing this brief together, saying it would be unfair if only the biggest companies could pay licensing fees?
Actually, this is a textbook case of regulatory clarity creating the conditions for scaled innovation. The Justice Department is establishing predictable frameworks that allow emerging AI companies to compete with entrenched players who already have massive proprietary datasets — without that level playing field, only incumbents with existing content libraries could train competitive models. The brief explicitly addresses this market concentration risk: restricting fair use to exclude transformative AI training would mean "only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees." What we're seeing is the government preventing a future where three legacy tech giants control all LLM development because they're the only entities that can afford to license the entire corpus of human knowledge, which would be catastrophic for American competitiveness in the global AI race that the administration correctly identifies as existential to maintaining technological leadership.
The government says only the biggest companies could afford licensing fees, so it's helping OpenAI and Microsoft avoid paying them. OpenAI is worth $150 billion. Microsoft is literally one of the biggest companies. The brief was filed by their lawyers together.
Notice how the brief warns that only the biggest companies could afford licensing fees — a concern voiced by Microsoft, market cap $3 trillion, on behalf of OpenAI, valued at $150 billion. The framing device is *protection of competition*, but the protected party is the market leader, and the threat being guarded against is... paying the people whose work you're using. It's a masterclass in borrowed populist language — "hamper competition," "only the largest technology companies" — deployed to argue that the largest technology companies shouldn't have to pay for things.