If you don't let us scrape copyrighted content, we will lose out to China says OpenAI as it tries to influence US government

The Trump administration is still asking for public comment on their AI Action plan. And, wouldn’t you know it? OpenAI has more than a few thoughts it would like to share with the US government. Namely, it would quite like its AI products to continue to be allowed to scrape copyrighted material, please and thank you.

Ahead of the March 15 deadline, OpenAI set out a number of proposals for the US government, which the company also shared in summary on its public blog. The point that stands out to me is titled “A copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn,” which encourages the US government to “avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People's Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”

OpenAI, particularly ChatGPT, is no stranger to gobbling up copyrighted material as training data, with the company arguing last year there’s just no way around it. The submitted proposal argues that OpenAI’s models are not fully replicating copyrighted material for public consumption but are instead learning “patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights” from the works.

OpenAI makes the case that, therefore, its “AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”

OpenAI’s proposal also broadly casts a dim view on AI legislation currently being discussed outside of the US. For example, OpenAI’s proposal criticises the EU and UK’s opt-out provisions for copyright holders, claiming, “Access to important AI inputs is less predictable and likely to become more difficult as the EU’s regulations take shape. Unpredictable availability of inputs hinders AI innovation, particularly for smaller, newer entrants with limited budgets.”

I’m personally not buying what OpenAI is selling here; the company’s ‘fair use’ argument largely sidesteps the point that, to build its AI models, copyrighted material has still been taken without the copyright holder’s permission, and OpenAI has profited off of using copyrighted material as training data.

This also isn’t some plucky young creator repurposing big IP to create a genuinely transformative work, this is a multi-billion dollar company hoovering up the work of creatives both big and small to fuel a ‘yes, and’ machine that is neither funny nor smart–and don’t even get me started on the currently in-development ‘creative writing’ model churning out purple prose.

The proposal goes on to claim, “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. Ultimately, access to more data from the widest possible range of sources will ensure more access to more powerful innovations that deliver even more knowledge.”

In the wake of DeepSeek going open-source, OpenAI is evidently feeling the pressure. Despite being developed at a fraction of the cost, the China-based AI model’s performance is comparable to OpenAI’s own ChatGPT–so much so that there were suspicions that DeepSeek may have copied the homework of OpenAI’s models.

The Trump administration will likely be interested in a number of OpenAI’s proposals, given that the current government is decidedly all-in on AI.

Besides nixing the Biden presidency’s Executive Order 14110, which aimed to put some safety guardrails around the development of AI, there’s the ‘Stargate’ AI infrastructure project. In a bid to support this AI vision with homegrown silicon, there was also that announcement of an eye-watering $100 billion investment to bring TSMC’s operations stateside, though that’s still under review by the Taiwanese government.

Still, even without TSMC’s most advanced tech, AI looks like it will have more than a toehold in the US.