By 
Entertainment unions are asking a federal judge to reject a blanket fair-use exemption for AI training, arguing that the use of creative work without a license can harm the people who make it as well as the companies that own or publish it.
SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild of America East and West, and AFM jointly filed a brief in a New York copyright case involving OpenAI, news outlets and individual writers, Deadline reports. The unions argue that fair use should instead be assessed case by case.
The filing brings a labor perspective to a dispute over copyright and AI development. Its central concern is not just whether a company can use existing work to train an AI model, but what a broad legal exemption could mean for creators’ ability to benefit from that use.
Deadline describes the document as a 34-page amicus brief: a submission offering arguments to the court in a case. The filing is the unions’ position, not a finding that OpenAI’s conduct violated copyright law.
Why the unions oppose a blanket exemption
Fair use is a copyright principle that can permit certain uses of protected material without the owner’s permission. The unions’ reported argument is about how that principle should be applied to AI training: they oppose treating the practice as categorically exempt and want individual uses assessed on their circumstances.
That distinction matters because a blanket exemption and a case-by-case approach answer different questions. The first would establish a broad rule for a class of activity; the second would leave room to examine the particular use at issue. The unions are asking for the latter rather than a general pass for training AI systems on others’ work.
The brief warns that a categorical exemption could shift a potentially vast amount of value from creators to corporations. It also argues that the harm from unlicensed training extends beyond the corporate plaintiffs in the case to the professionals whose work lies behind the material being used.
The unions’ focus on those professionals gives the filing a different emphasis from a dispute framed solely around publishers’ rights. News organizations are among the parties in the consolidated case, but the brief points to the human work behind news and other forms of writing, according to Deadline.
That is an argument about who has a stake in the outcome, rather than a finding about any particular worker’s losses. The unions are asking the judge to consider how a general rule could affect people whose creative labor may not be represented by the name of a corporate plaintiff.
How licensing protections fit into the dispute
The filing also connects the court fight to agreements reached by entertainment workers. Deadline reports that the writers and actors guilds obtained a right to notice and bargaining concerning third-party licenses of covered work for training commercial generative AI systems.
The unions argue that a categorical fair-use ruling could make negotiated licensing terms moot. Their concern is that the value of a right to bargain over licensing would be affected if a broad category of training use did not require a license in the first place.
Copyright and labor agreements are distinct parts of that argument. The case concerns copyright claims involving OpenAI and other parties; the guild provisions concern notice and bargaining over certain licenses. The unions’ brief links them by arguing that a broad copyright exemption could undermine protections workers negotiated.
The New York-based action brings together claims involving The New York Times, other news outlets and individual writers. The writers identified in the reporting include Ta-Nehisi Coates, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Sarah Silverman; the Authors Guild is also involved.
The unions’ intervention asks the court to look beyond any one publisher or writer when considering the legal framework for AI training. Their preferred approach would keep the assessment tied to individual cases, while their warning about licensing explains why they regard the broader rule as consequential for working creators.
