OpenAI Invokes Chinese Competition in Call for Lighter AI Regulations

By Scott Ikeda for CPO Magazine
Tuesday, March 18, 2025

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It remains to be seen exactly how amenable the Trump administration will be to the AI regulations proposal, but the president and other key members have used similar language before in describing the competition with China as an “arms race.” Trump has also castigated the prior Biden policy on AI as “stifling innovation.” And while Musk and OpenAI do not see eye-to-eye, the administration has nevertheless moved ahead with its “Stargate” long-term AI infrastructure investment project that directly involves Sam Altman’s group among big industry players.

Dr Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb, attorney-at-law and a Vice-Chair at the ABA’s Information Security Committee, notes that fighting for copyright exemption may really be a battle for financial survival for AI developers: “Arguably, the most problematic issue with the proposal – legally, practically and socially speaking – is copyright. Paying a truly fair fee to all authors – whose copyrighted content has already been or will be used to train powerful LLM models that are eventually aimed at competing with those authors – will probably be economically unviable, as AI vendors will never make profits. Of note, millions of authors from all around the globe, whose creative content was already misappropriated and exploited to unwarrantedly train for-profit AI models without any permission or even in a direct breach of licensing agreements, still stay without a dime of compensation. In the meantime, some AI giants awkwardly strive to make everybody forget about the inconvenient past and to blindly focus on the allegedly bright future. Advocating for a special regime or copyright exception for AI technologies – which will likely deprive human authors of the true value of fruits of their intellectual labor – will unlikely be even close to fairness. Moreover, the entire discussion towards an exception is a slippery slope that may unleash a parade of horrors: if AI technology deserves some exemptions from copyright protection, why other modern technologies don’t? Lawmakers should take OpenAI’s proposal with a high degree of caution, being mindful of the long-lasting consequences it may have on the American economy and legal system.” Read Full Article