In the AI world, everyone always seems to be going for broke. It’s AGI or bust — or as the gloomier title of a recent book has it, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. This rhetorical severity is backed up by big bets and bigger asks, hundreds of billions of dollars invested by companies that now say they’ll need trillions to build, essentially, the only companies that matter. To put it another way: They’re really going for it.

This is as clear in the scope of the infrastructure as it is in stories about the post-human singularity, but it’s happening somewhere else, too: In the quite human realm of law and regulation, where AI firms are making bids and demands that are, in their way, no less extreme. From The Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, according to people familiar with the matter …

The opt-out process for the new version of Sora means that movie studios and other intellectual property owners would have to explicitly ask OpenAI not to include their copyright material in videos the tool creates.

This is pretty close to the maximum possible bid OpenAI can make here, in terms of its relationship to copyright — a world in which rights holders must opt out of inclusion in OpenAI’s model is one in which OpenAI is........

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