Congress Must Step In to Fix AI Companies’ Mass Theft of Copyrighted Works: Senator Josh Hawley
Congress Must Step In to Fix AI Companies’ Mass Theft of Copyrighted Works: Senator Josh Hawley
AI companies are training their models on allegedly stolen materials and have copied enough works to fill 22 Libraries of Congress, Senator Hawley said.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism recently held a hearing titled ‘Too Big to Prosecute: Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training.’ Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), Subcommittee Chair, described generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train large language models (LLMs) and chatbots as “the largest IP theft in American history,” rejecting arguments that courts alone should resolve the issue.
“AI companies are training their models on stolen materials and have copied enough works to fill 22 Libraries of Congress,” Hawley said. In his opening and subsequent remarks, he cited public documents from a pending lawsuit between Meta and several authors, claiming that Meta employees had repeatedly warned the company that using plagiarized works would create legal risks.
Hawley reportedly said, “Meta’s conduct is not an exception, it’s the rule in the AI space: do whatever you want and count on lawyers and lobbyists to fix it later. They care about power and money.” He argued that AI companies’ claims that the U.S. must ease tech regulation to stay ahead of China “fell flat,” adding, “When they say, ‘we can’t let China beat us,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘give us truckloads of cash and let us steal everything from you and make billions on it.’”
The hearing featured testimony from five witnesses, including three professors, an attorney representing authors in the Meta case, and bestselling author David Baldacci. Professor Bhamati Viswanathan of New England Law School reportedly stated, “If you and I stole books from the library or a bookstore and said, ‘I need to train, I need to learn, I need to develop my mind,’ we wouldn’t argue that’s fair use—we’d say, ‘you can’t steal the materials even for a good cause.’” But AI companies are “going beyond that by going to pirate websites and stealing materials that have already been stolen—it’s a crime compounding a crime,” she said.
Baldacci testified that when his son asked ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a David Baldacci novel, “in about five seconds, three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written, including plot lines, twists, character names, narrative, the works—that’s when I found out the AI community had taken most of my novels without permission and fed them into their machine learning system.”
In contrast, Professor Edward Lee of Santa Clara University School of Law defended the use of copyrighted works to train AI, arguing it aligns with the national priority of maintaining an advantage over China.
Hawley concluded, “If the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world worth trillions of dollars can come take an individual author’s work like Mr. Baldacci’s, lie about it, hide it, profit off it, and there’s nothing our law does about that, then we need to change the law. We’ve got to do something about this.”
