OpenAI and Google have asked the United States government to allow the use of copyrighted material to train their AI models.
ChatGPT’s developer OpenAI supports President Trump’s ambition to maintain America’s leadership in artificial general intelligence (AGI) to make people “more productive, more prosperous, and more free.”
However, American companies like OpenAI have to compete with Chinese AI startups like DeepSeek, which is “state-subsidized, state-controlled, and freely available.” The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is determined to overtake the US by 2030. Far-reaching measures are necessary to stay ahead of the curve.
OpenAI argues that Chinese AI models are free to train with copyright-protected material, threatening to put American AI companies behind China. According to the AI developer, it is in the interest of national security to allow the fair use rules to apply to AI training. If not, “democratic models” will lose the AI race.
Therefore, in order to remain a market leader in AI, OpenAI proposes that the training of its AI models should be considered fair use.
“America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely because the fair use doctrine promotes AI development. In other markets, rigid copyright rules are repressing innovation and investment,” OpenAI says in a letter addressed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Trump administration.
Like OpenAI, Google states that copyright, privacy, and patent laws can impede access to data necessary for training AI models. That’s why the industry must have access to openly available data to enable “fair learning.”
“Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rights holders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.
Both companies want these suggestions to be part of President Trump’s upcoming AI Action Plan. In January, Trump signed an executive order to create a plan to strengthen America’s global AI dominance. Among other things, the administration wants to prevent unnecessarily burdensome requirements from hampering AI innovation by private companies.
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