'National Security'

Google and OpenAI make the case to the government that they should be able to train on whatever data they want.

When Big Tech is accused of shall we say sketchy behavior, you can bet the farm that China is going to be invoked at some point. That was definitely the case last week when OpenAI and Google both pointed to China's ambitions to be a world leader in AI as the reason they should be allowed to train their large language models on copyrighted works.

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Is the threat of China enough to justify violating copyright? (Credit: Ideogram)

The copyright war just became an AI cold war

When the Trump administration nullified the previous administration's executive order on AI and issued its own, the first phase was a period of public input. That input included detailed memos from some of the biggest companies in AI, including OpenAI and Google. As you'd expect, the two companies adopted a stance that made the case for increased investment and a pro-innovation regulatory framework. They also took on the issue of copyright directly.

Both companies defended the training of AI models on publicly available data—that is, information that is published on the open web. It isn't a shock that they'd defend something that has become a standard part of their business practice, but the executive order gives them an opportunity to advance a specific part of the argument: national security.

AI is many things: a paradigm-shifting technology, an existential crisis for media companies, and a great way to find out how long to boil beans. It's also an arms race. The U.S. is desperate to become the world leader in AI if only to ensure China does not. And the emergence of DeepSeek earlier this year got everyone thinking the race is much closer than it appeared to be.

OpenAI specifically cited China's rapid advancement in AI as a factor, if not the factor, in why U.S. labs should have the legal right to train on copyrighted works without the explicit permission of rights holders. Requiring U.S. AI companies to license the content they ingest would effectively coronate China as Earth's AI ruler, they say, because Chinese companies have already shown they will train on publicly available data regardless of what the rules are.

How DeepSeek made everything more urgent

That much is true: Even if we didn't have the evidence of DeepSeek (which appears to have been trained on ChatGPT outputs), China has historically shown it's willing to ignore intellectual property rights to gain a competitive advantage. Regardless of what the law may say in America or other parts of the world, it seems certain that China will simply skirt those laws when it comes to building its own models.

Does that justify America shaping its laws to allow AI companies to train on everybody's data? Many content creators don't think so. I'm also fairly certain the argument—which the major labs have been making in some form for a while—hasn't inspired many (or any) artists, authors, or media companies to drop their copyright lawsuits against OpenAI.