AI Regulations: Tech Giants and Hollywood Converge on White House AI Strategy

Google, OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and a group of 400 entertainment industry celebrities were among those who submitted 8,755 comments on a request for ideas for a U.S. AI Action Plan.

The comment period for the plan ended Saturday (March 15), and according to a White House statement, the comments would aid in the “development of an AI Action Plan to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.”

Among the comments was a group of more than 400 Hollywood actors, directors, musicians, writers and other insiders who have signed an open letter to the Trump administration urging the government not to weaken copyright laws for AI model training.

Celebrities including Cate Blanchett, Mark Ruffalo and Paul McCartney decried recommendations by OpenAI and Google to “remove all legal protections and existing guardrails” around the use of copyrighted content for AI training.

Such removal would threaten 2.3 million American jobs and more than $229 billion in annual wages for the arts and entertainment industry, they said.

“There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish. Not when AI companies can use our copyrighted material by simply doing what the law requires: negotiating appropriate licenses with copyright holders — just as every other industry does,” the letter said.

The letter was sent to the National Science Foundation, which was soliciting comments for the U.S. AI Action Plan. The action plan will “define priority policy actions,” according to the administration.

The proposal drew 8,755 comments, including the letter from the entertainment industry.

Read more: OpenAI Calls for Federal Government to Preempt State AI Laws

OpenAI’s proposals include letting AI models train on copyrighted material while protecting the rights of content creators.

“America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation,” according to the startup. “The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC (China) by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”

Google’s proposals include “balanced copyright rules” that allow the use of copyrighted content when it comes to “fair use and text-and-date mining.”

“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.”

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz waded into the discussion with its own submitted comments. It urged the government to clarify the “proper” relationship between copyright law and model development.

“Access to training data is now the most important factor in determining global AI leadership,” the VC firm wrote. But U.S. “legacy media companies, among others, are waging war against using their data for AI training, advancing misguided arguments that this infringes their copyrights.”

Andreessen Horowitz argued that creators’ works need to be protected. However, an “aggressive” interpretation of copyright law “places U.S. developers at a significant disadvantage” over other nations with looser IP laws, such as China, the firm said.

The company recommended that the government clarify that training AI models on copyright works are allowed under current copyright laws. This is to avoid “needless” lawsuits to stop “necessary” model training.

The VC firm also said the Justice Department should file statements of interest in pending AI copyright lawsuits, and explain that model training is “fair use” because it is “transformative, uses no more data than necessary to train the models, and poses no risk to the market for the original work.”

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