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The Trump administration recently asked American developers, including OpenAI, for input on what the U.S. needs to do to stay ahead in the global AI competition. We believe that preserving AI’s ability to learn should be at the top of the list.
In the early years of the internet, landmark legal rulings affirmed that U.S. copyright law protected the right to freely browse the web, link to other sites, and host content, setting the stage for American leadership in search, social media, and the cloud. Courts relied on the fair use doctrine, giving innovators the freedom to learn from copyrighted material and advance America’s technological edge.
Today, artificial intelligence is poised to scale human ingenuity itself–the sum of our freedoms to learn and know, think, create, and produce. Humans have never created a technology that can do as much to advance education, science, and discovery–and we’re already seeing its benefits.
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California State University is creating an AI-powered curriculum and putting ChatGPT in the hands of 500,000 students and educators to build an AI-ready workforce. The National Labs are using cutting-edge AI to unlock breakthroughs, with 1,500 scientists exploring how OpenAI’s tools can accelerate discoveries.
And we are still at the beginning–like a child who has been handed a junior chemistry lab kit and has a whole lifetime of learning, experimenting, and creating ahead of her.
The history of human progress has been one of us shaping our tools, and our tools shaping us, including our freedoms. Free speech has been repeatedly reimagined, from the town square and the printing press, to newspapers, mass media, and the internet.
Realizing AI’s potential means preserving two core liberties: the freedom of intelligence, which gives people the right to benefit from AI without overly restrictive laws; and the freedom to learn, which ensures the ability to access public facts and information on any topic. Together, they form the foundation of a democratic AI future—one that the U.S. will only be able to shape if it ensures that American AI developers retain the ability to access the data used to train models like ChatGPT.
The stakes—and the urgency—became even clearer this week with Chinese startup DeepSeek’s release of a major upgrade to its existing AI model. DeepSeek’s rapid improvement is no accident: unlike their American counterparts, Chinese AI developers face no restrictions on the data they can use to train their systems—giving them a growing competitive advantage.
With the Trump administration seeking public input for its upcoming AI Action Plan, there is only one clear path to preserving the freedom of intelligence and the freedom to learn–an “AI Deal” rooted in fair use, realism, and shared growth.
Fair Use
To sustain America’s AI lead and maximize its benefits for education, science, and healthcare, policymakers must ensure that copyright law fulfills its constitutional mandate to encourage creativity and innovation.
That means preserving access to fundamental science and publicly available content used to train AI tools for the rising AI industry. This includes ChatGPT and OpenAI’s other tools–used by more than 400 million people and 3 million developers to create jobs and economic opportunity–and products and infrastructure from stalwarts like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Oracle. It also includes the thousands of “Little Tech” startups that will fuel the growth of tomorrow.
Some of this content may be copyrighted, and courts have held that utilizing such material is fair use when an application is transformative, meaning it uses existing works to create something new and different and without eroding the commercial value of such works. And this is especially so for fundamental concepts of science and math, which belong to all of humanity and can be owned by no one.
AI models are profoundly transformative. They use massive computational power to learn deep mathematical patterns, analyses, and insights from trillions of datapoints so they can create new content–or even “think” in an inner monologue like a person. They are designed to create profound new insights and understandings, and have safeguards to avoid replicating the material they learn from.
American developers must be able to rely on fair use to continue these breakthroughs, while advancing such safeguards and protecting against the misuse of voice and likeness.
Realism
Laws are bound by nations, while technologies remain borderless. The internet is global and content is available everywhere, but not everyone plays by the same rules. DeepSeek’s rise illustrates that broader truth.
The company is based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has a history of flouting U.S. intellectual property rights and a national goal of leading the world in AI by 2030. DeepSeek and other AI developers in the PRC have unrestricted access to vast quantities of content, including copyrighted materials. DeepSeek’s outputs already replicate song lyrics and portions of books.
Limiting critical training data for American developers would competitively disadvantage OpenAI and its peers without protecting rightsholders. It would also negatively impact the broader U.S. AI ecosystem, from the Fortune 500 companies that rely on American AI models to the start-ups leveraging the technology to create businesses and jobs.
On the other end, the European Union has written rules that limit access to training data, and the U.K. is considering similar moves. This would slow innovation, create uncertainty for their AI developers, and deter talent and capital.
Securing our collective technological edge requires a harmonious AI ecosystem across multiple democratic countries. Without it, democratic AI could be imperiled as global AI competition intensifies. America must lead, and use its lead, wisely.
Shared Growth
America thrives when Americans thrive. Too often, it’s been the former without enough of the latter, and everyone is worse off for it. The Trump administration can set a national AI strategy that gets the balance right by doing at least three things.
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First, the transformational use of copyrighted content to train AI to advance the Constitutional goal to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” is fully supported by fair use but challenged in the courts. The administration should strongly defend it.
Second, the administration should make more government data and government-funded data available to AI developers to fuel innovation.
Third, the administration should track whether the overall level of data available to American innovators is decreasing because of policies at home and abroad, with an eye on preserving our global competitiveness.
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Getting the balance right will unleash investments on a scale never seen before, like OpenAI’s new Stargate Project, which will invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the country, creating jobs and driving spending and economic growth in local communities. American businesses large and small will have the certainty they need to integrate AI solutions–such as custom AI agents–to boost worker productivity, accelerate innovation, and compete globally.
The choice is clear: promote innovation by protecting fair use and the policies that fuel job creation and breakthroughs in education, science, and healthcare—or cede leadership and let others who don’t play by the same rules control the future of this revolutionary technology.