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17 March 2025 - - OpenAI says the U.S. will lose the AI race if it's unable to scrape copyrighted materials — and its favorite bogeyman, China, will take the crown instead. So Sam Altman wants legal action taken - by the White House.
Noor Al-Sibai, who posts on Linkedin and writes for Ars Technica, Futurism and Wire News has been following his story and she has collected a few juicy bits.
As Ars Technica has reported, Sam the Man is begging Donald Trump to instate federal regulations defining "fair use," the thorny standard at the heart of the copyright lawsuits lobbed against OpenAI by The New York Times and other companies. And he has Elon Musk in his corner.
This policy proposal from OpenAI to the White House's Office of Science and Technology comes amid increasing momentum on the state level to regulate AI. In the lengthy document Trump probably will not read himself, OpenAI said that it could not compete with China — which the company insists on calling the People's Republic of China, or PRC for short, throughout — if regulations stymie AI access to copyrighted works for training data:
"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. America loses, as does the success of democratic AI."
Though OpenAI insists that using copyrighted materials will help it "ensure more access to more powerful innovations that deliver even more knowledge," publishers chagrined at their work being fed into AI training data disagree — especially when those models spit out straight-up plagiarized outputs.
In the same statement, the AI giant twisted the long-established "fair use doctrine," a legal framework allowing limited access to copyrighted materials without prior permission for quotations in articles and other normal, non-infringing usages. OpenAI also suggested that somehow, being unable to scrape copyrighted works is a matter of "national security". Their proposal states:
"Applying the fair use doctrine to AI is not only a matter of American competitiveness — it's a matter of national security. The rapid advances seen with the PRC's DeepSeek, among other recent developments, show that America's lead on frontier AI is far from guaranteed".
Ironically, OpenAI has, as the Ars Technica piece notes, accused DeepSeek of improperly using its data without permission - a point the company failed to bring up in its policy proposal, probably because it feels embarrassingly hypocritical. Says OpenAI:
"The federal government can both secure Americans' freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC by preserving American AI models' ability to learn from copyrighted material".
As of now, it's unclear whether Trump will fall for OpenAI's gambit. If Altman and his ilk butter him up enough, however, there's a good chance he might side with them — at the expense of copyright holders the world around.
Because here is what worries copyright holders. Trump's "AI Action Plan", due out this July, aims to settle all of the copyright debates (and legal cases) by declaring AI training "fair use" - paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to anything and everything. And every AI company wants that.
And, as the Ars Technica piece linked above points out, OpenAI - and really every other U.S.-based AI company - says it is "constrained", suggesting that 100s of U.S. state laws are attempting to regulate the entire AI industry. One legislative tracker from MultiState flagged 832 laws introduced in 2025 alone. Plus Wired magazine published "Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized" which offers a wealth of information.
So, the AI community wants Trump to enact a federal law that preempts all state laws attempting to regulate AI, from threats to consumer privacy to election integrity, to deepfakes, and facial recognition.
Oh, yes, and declare all that collecting and scraping as "fair use".
And Happy St Patrick's Day
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