The Trump administration has unveiled an ambitious blueprint for U.S. dominance of artificial intelligence, outlining actions to accelerate innovation, build infrastructure and lead internationally. The plan envisions AI ushering in “an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance — all at once,” positioning AI development as a national security imperative for maintaining America’s technological leadership.

Yet none of these carefully crafted policies can succeed if restrictive copyright interpretations strangle AI development in its infancy. The administration’s vision of American AI setting “global standards” and powering a “new golden age of human flourishing” depends entirely on companies being able to train AI systems on vast datasets.

If courts adopt restrictive copyright interpretations that prevent AI from training on existing texts, America’s comprehensive AI leadership strategy will be impossible to execute. This would effectively cede technological dominance to nations with fewer legal constraints.

To properly apply copyright law to this technology, courts must first distinguish between AI training and content generation — two fundamentally different processes with distinct legal implications.

AI training involves analyzing vast text datasets to identify statistical patterns in language, converting words into mathematical representations that create statistical models. This process does not store original texts any more than human readers memorize........

© The Hill