US backs OpenAI fair use but calls Chinese model distillation a threat
In September 2026 the US government took two opposing positions on AI data use. On Sept 1 the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the Southern District of New York backing OpenAI in copyright suits brought by The New York Times and other publishers, arguing that training models on copyrighted text is highly transformative fair use and that requiring licenses would be unacceptable. On Sept 8, the NSA, CISA and FBI issued a joint cybersecurity advisory saying six Chinese firms used APIs to distill US frontier models such as Claude and GPT, extracting billions of tokens, and labeled it malicious, targeted capability theft. The article argues training and distillation are technically kindred: both use existing corpora without individual authorization, both yield new parameters rather than copies, and both may substitute for the original market — differing mainly in whether the material learned from is human work or machine output.
It suggests US data-rights rules are being drawn along industrial interest, leaving the legality of both training data and API outputs unsettled.
2026年9月，美国政府分别在两件AI数据法律事件中给出了两种截然不同的立场：9月1日，美国司法部向纽约南区联邦法院提交了一份“利益声明”，用以支持OpenAI在《纽约时报》等出版商版权诉讼中的主张——OpenAI的培训“极具变革性”，鉴于美国向来所珍视“技术创新和国家安全”，因此使用受版权保护文本训练大模型......
本文来自微信公众号： Internet Law Review ，作者：Lisa Klaassen，原文标题：《AI的合理使用与蒸馏模型有区别吗？——定义“学习”的权力》
2026年9月，美国政府分别在两件AI数据法律事件中给出了两种截然不同的立场：
9月1日，美国司法部向纽约南区联邦法院提交了一份“利益声明”，用以支持OpenAI在《纽约时报》等出版商版权诉讼中的主张——OpenAI的培训“极具变革性”，鉴于美国向来所珍视“技术创新和国家安全”，因此使用受版权保护文本训练大模型属于“高度转换性”的“合理使用”，进而要求AI公司对其训练版权内容申请授权或许可是“不可接受”的。
#OpenAI#Anthropic#Microsoft#Meta#xAI#Grok#Claude#GPT#US Department of Justice#NSA#CISA#FBI