President Trump said the DOJ will rein in AI risks "if we have to," even as newly unsealed statements from OpenAI and Microsoft executives dealt a blow to the companies' fair-use defense in the ongoing New York Times copyright lawsuit.
President Donald Trump said Monday that the Department of Justice and other U.S. law enforcement agencies stand ready to rein in risks associated with artificial intelligence, even as he again downplayed the technology's dangers and vowed not to slow its development.
"We will be careful, and that's why we have the Department of Justice, and other Law Enforcement bodies, that will rein things in if we have to, but I will only encourage AI or, SI (SUPER INTELLIGENCE)!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The remarks came roughly one week after Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher at Anthropic, resigned and publicly warned that his former employer and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives" with the technology. Following Coxon's warning, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis each called for a slowdown of AI development and additional federal oversight of their industry.
Trump has repeatedly characterized AI safety concerns as a hoax and has framed American AI development as a competitive advantage the United States must maintain. "Whoever wins AI, WINS!" he wrote in the same post. "We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I'm going to keep it that way!"
The White House has taken a largely hands-off approach to AI regulation. A Trump executive order issued in June asked companies to voluntarily cooperate with the administration in evaluating "covered frontier models" and to provide the government access up to 30 days before a broad public release.
Trump's comments arrived on the same day that newly unsealed statements from Microsoft and OpenAI executives sharpened the legal stakes in the New York Times copyright lawsuit unfolding in a Lower Manhattan courthouse.
Among the disclosed materials, an OpenAI executive allegedly acknowledged that the company's chatbots represented an "existential threat" to journalism by delivering information directly to users and reducing the need to visit original news sources. Microsoft's director of applied science, Brent Hecht, reportedly described the AI training process as "the largest theft of labor in human history," according to the Washington Post.
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman reportedly wrote in 2017 that he was "deeply motivated by the gazillions" he hoped to earn commercializing the technology, according to the Financial Times, and allegedly responded "ah nice" when informed that an employee had found a way around the Times' paywall. The companies' own internal data reportedly showed that Times click-through rates dropped sharply as a result of AI-generated responses.
The unsealed material complicates the defendants' "fair-use" defense, which rests on demonstrating that the accused product is neither a substitute for nor a direct competitor to the original work.
One complicating factor for the Times is a September 1 statement of interest filed by the Department of Justice asking the court to rule that training AI models on copyrighted material constitutes fair use, citing national security. The DOJ's argument holds that restricting U.S. AI systems from training on broadly available content risks ceding an insurmountable lead to foreign adversaries.
The combination of the unsealed executive statements and the DOJ's posture sets up a high-stakes collision between copyright law, competitive national interest, and the economics of digital journalism — with the outcome likely to shape how AI companies source training data for years to come.
Marc Sabatini is a staff writer at TechEchelon covering enterprise software, cybersecurity, and the regulatory beats that shape both. He focuses on the deal flow and policy decisions that move markets.
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