• •The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted a Statement of Interest in the Silverman v. OpenAI litigation.
• •The government asserts that copyright protection for AI-generated output is generally unavailable if the work lacks human authorship.
• •Unresolved is the specific threshold for 'human-assisted' work, leaving a gap in how courts will distinguish between generative outputs and human-directed AI collaboration.

The U.S. government has formally weighed in on the copyright dispute between author Sarah Silverman and OpenAI, filing a Statement of Interest with the court. While the DOJ is not a party to the lawsuit, it seeks to clarify the Copyright Office's longstanding position that AI-generated works without human intervention fall outside current copyright protections. This filing highlights ongoing tension between established IP law and emerging generative AI capabilities, which were not envisioned when the Copyright Act was last significantly updated. Whether this statement limits the scope of damages for plaintiffs in AI-training lawsuits remains to be seen, as the court must now determine if the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for model training constitutes a separate violation from the resulting output.