The Battle over AI and Copyright Enters a New Phase

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In January, President Trump issued an executive order with the title “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” The document revoked a previous order by former president Joe Biden (“Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence”), which had built on voluntary commitments to his administration by leading US AI companies, including OpenAI and Google, “to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology.” Last month, the new administration put out a call for public comment on the development of an AI Action Plan. Like Trump’s order, the call stressed the importance of ensuring American AI dominance, emphasizing that it “will define priority policy actions to enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse and prevent unnecessarily burdensome requirements from hindering private sector innovation.” This desire for dominance is rooted in the assumption that “continued US AI leadership will promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” 

As the administration invests hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, AI companies are positioning themselves to benefit. In January, for instance, OpenAI released ChatGPT Gov, a tool “designed to streamline government agencies’ access to OpenAI’s frontier models.” And recently, OpenAI and Google used Trump’s call for comment as an opportunity to tackle what they perceive to be one of the biggest obstacles to US dominance in generative AI: copyright law. Both companies submitted proposals endorsing, among other things, the weakening of copyright restrictions on AI training and the codification of a right for US AI companies to train their models on publicly available data largely without restriction.

In a letter, Google criticized the “disproportionate attention” that has been paid to risks associated with AI and embraced the Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to regulation (while calling for comprehensive federal privacy and security standards to bring clarity to the chaos of a state-by-state approach); it also argued that exceptions that allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training “avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation.” OpenAI, meanwhile, leaned heavily into an AI “arms race” narrative, writing that the Trump administration’s plan “can ensure that American-led AI built on democratic principles continues to prevail over CCP-built autocratic, authoritarian AI,” a reference to the Chinese Communist Party. Describing its Chinese competitor DeepSeek as “state-subsidized and state-controlled” and vulnerable to manipulation by the CCP, OpenAI claimed that if Chinese developers “have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over. America loses.” OpenAI also claimed that “rigid copyright rules are repressing innovation and investment” and argued that their models operate under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law, in that they use “existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the[ir] commercial value.”

The proposals come as these companies and others continue to face significant legal challenges from news publishers and other content creators on grounds including copyright infringement. OpenAI is facing lawsuits from US media companies including the New York Times, eight papers owned by Alden Global Capital, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet, as well as international publishers including a coalition of Canada’s biggest news organizations, several Indian outlets, and the UK parenting forum and publisher Mumsnet. Last month, Chegg, an education technology company, sued Google, claiming that its AI-generated summaries of search results have hurt its traffic and revenue. Also last month, a court ruled against Ross Intelligence, an AI startup in the legal sector, finding it liable for copyright infringement against Thomson Reuters. The judge determined that Ross’s AI outputs competed directly with material from a Thomson Reuters research firm on which they had been trained. ArsTechnica’s Ashley Belanger suggested last week that “OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits.” 

The new submissions from OpenAI and Google have sparked significant opposition. Brian Merchant, a tech journalist and author, characterized them as “dark stuff” on his Substack, Blood in the Machine, and as “a $160 billion AI company and a $2 trillion tech giant invoking the need to maintain technological—and implicitly, military—superiority over China, the former casting it as a foe, to justify eroding artists’ already meager rights and protections.” (Indeed, the whole framing of an AI war between the US and China is contested, as Camille Bromley explored in yesterday’s newsletter.) According to Axios, dozens of newspapers owned by Alden ran an editorial calling the submissions “self-serving proposals” and urging the government to reject them and “protect the work of creators and copyright holders who have been the victims of these companies.” The editorial itself invoked American patriotism, arguing that an “iron-clad commitment to protecting the rights of owners of work they themselves created is precisely what distinguishes the United States from communist China, not the reverse.”

Indeed, groups seeking to defend strong copyright protections also submitted public comments on the AI Action Plan. The News/Media Alliance—which represents over two thousand US publishers, some of which filed a copyright and trademark infringement case against an AI startup called Cohere last month—submitted a letter proposing that the plan respect intellectual property, support the development of voluntary licensing in free markets, and promote appropriate transparency and fair competition in the AI and technology sector. “The future of generative AI requires sustaining the incentives for the continued production of news and other quality content that, in turn, builds and powers generative AI models and products,” the alliance wrote. More than four hundred filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians, and other Hollywood creative leaders—including Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, and Paul McCartney—also signed an open letter submitted as a public comment, urging the administration not to roll back copyright protections. They wrote that AI companies “are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds.”

The AI Action Plan is set to be released in July of this year. Until then, as Sara Fischer wrote in Axios, “both media companies and AI makers are operating on unsettled ground.” The central question remains whether the government can balance AI innovation with established copyright protections. As Danielle Coffey, the president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, argued in a press release about the group’s public comment, “We believe intellectual property rights encourage American innovation, rather than hinder it. By protecting those rights, the US can be a leader in both AI and content creation industries, rather than sacrificing one to benefit the other.”

Other notable stories:

• CJR’s Meghnad Bose reports on steps that various news organizations are taking to protect sources who are immigrants amid a Trump administration crackdown. “Many of these outlets are simply doubling down on extensive policies they’ve had for years; others are taking novel steps, including going out of their way to help potential subjects understand the implications of talking to the press” or liberalizing policies around the use of anonymous sourcing, Bose writes. “Some publications told CJR that they’re finding—perhaps not surprisingly—that even with additional safety measures, many immigrants are more reluctant to participate in newsgathering.” But “other sources seem undeterred”—a fact that the managing editor of the California outlet El Tímpano called “a remarkable testament to people understanding the power of storytelling.”
  
• In this newsletter last week, we wrote about apparent efforts on the part of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests, and the importance of journalists’ continuing to file them. This week, 404 Media successfully used FOIA to obtain records from various agencies related to a Trump order on gender, suggesting, Jason Koebler writes, that “it will likely be possible to get information about what the administration is doing by using public records requests.” This may be “a way to bring transparency and some semblance of accountability to an administration that has gutted the federal workforce and has attempted to evade public records laws, especially when those FOIAs are filed with non-DOGE agencies.”
  
• In media-business news, Will Lewis, the CEO of the Washington Post, reportedly told opinion staffers at the paper that they can’t write about the paper itself, amid a series of controversies regarding its ownership and management. (He described this as “restating” a “house policy.”) Elsewhere, around one in five staffers at the Chicago Sun-Times have agreed to take a buyout offered by Chicago Public Media, the paper’s nonprofit owner. Jeremy Boreing, the cofounder of the right-wing Daily Wire, is stepping down as the outlet’s co-CEO to focus on in-house “creative projects.” And the digital media firm Ziff Davis has acquired The Skimm, a women-focused newsletter company.
  
• Canada’s Conservative Party told news outlets that journalists will be barred from traveling on campaign vehicles with Pierre Poilievre, its leader, in upcoming national elections—the first time a major party has implemented such a policy, according to the CBC. A party official cited rising travel costs and the potential for remote coverage, while insisting that campaign events will still be accessible, including via video-link, but the policy is likely to change the makeup of the press pool covering Poilievre, per the CBC. (ICYMI, CJR’s Lauren Watson explored his fractious relationship with the press.)
  
• And for Nieman Lab, Jordan Teicher profiled Jake Fischer, a scoopy NBA reporter who, unlike competitors at major outlets, works from his apartment and publishes on a Substack (that isn’t even his own Substack). Fischer started making relationships around the NBA by writing “non-threatening stories” during an internship at Sports Illustrated, he says. “When a college kid asks me, ‘How do you develop sources?’ I tell them right away, ‘Stop trying to develop sources.’ Just meet people and treat them as a person.” 

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