OpenAI is calling on the Trump administration to give AI companies an exemption to train their models on copyrighted material. In a blog post spotted by The Verge, the company this week published its response to President Trump's AI Action Plan. Announced at the end of February, the initiative saw the White House seek input from private industry, with the goal of eventually enacting policy that will work to "enhance America's position as an AI powerhouse" and enable innovation in the sector. 

"America's robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system's role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America's AI leadership and national security," OpenAI writes in its submission. "The federal government can both secure Americans' freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People's Republic of China] by preserving American AI models' ability to learn from copyrighted material."

In the same document, the company recommends the US maintain tight export controls on AI chips to China. It also says the US government should broadly adopt AI tools. Incidentally, OpenAI began offering a version of ChatGPT designed for US government use earlier this year.

This week, Google also published its own list of recommendations for the president's AI Action Plan. Like OpenAI, the search giant says it should be able to train AI models on copyrighted material.

"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," Google writes. "These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation."

Last year, OpenAI said it would be "impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials." The company currently faces numerous lawsuits accusing it of copyright infringement, including ones involving The New York Times and a group of authors led by George R.R. Martin and Jonathan Franzen. At the same time, the company recently accused Chinese AI startups of trying to copy its technologies.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-and-google-ask-for-a-government-exemption-to-train-their-ai-models-on-copyrighted-material-212906990.html?src=rss

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OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”

The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.

In its comment, Open claims that allowing AI companies to access copyrighted content would help the US “avoid forfeiting” its lead in AI to China, while calling out the rise of DeepSeek. 

“There’s little doubt that the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] AI developers will enjoy unfettered access to data — including copyrighted data — that will improve their models,” OpenAI writes. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.”

Google, unsurprisingly, agrees. The company’s response similarly states that copyright, privacy, and patents policies “can impede appropriate access to data necessary for training leading models.” It adds that fair use policies, along with text and data mining exceptions, have been “critical” to training AI on publicly available data.

“These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.

Anthropic, the AI company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also submitted a proposal – but it doesn’t mention anything about copyrights. Instead, it asks the US government to develop a system to assess an AI model’s national security risks and to strengthen export controls on AI chips. Like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic also suggests that the US bolster its energy infrastructure to support the growth of AI.

Many AI companies have been accused of ripping copyrighted content to train their AI models. OpenAI currently faces several lawsuits from news outlets, including The New York Times, and has even been sued by well-known names like Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin. Apple, Anthropic, and Nvidia have also been accused of scraping YouTube subtitles to train AI, which YouTube has said violates its terms.

Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesn’t plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. “I hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,” Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. “But I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now.”

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