Trump says he favours a "common sense" approach to copyright

In a speech to an appreciative audience of tech industry leaders, the US president went off script to reveal some of his thinking on copyright and AI

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:29, 24 July 2025

US President Donald Trump has outlined his thoughts on the use of copyrighted material for the purposes of training AI applications. In a speech given at an AI Summit in Washington DC on Wednesday, Trump told a room packed with leading technology grandees, including many with huge stakes in the advancement of AI systems, that, "You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied you're supposed to pay for."

The speech President Trump made, featuring the signing of three executive orders at the close, was largely around the steps his administration is taking to lessen the regulatory burden on companies working in the field of AI, embodied by the publication of his government's AI Action Plan. There's no doubt the plan will be well-received in Silicon Valley, and seeking as it does to leverage the US advantage in the technology, Trump is doing what he said he'd do during the election - putting America first.

Yet the specific future of AI technologies, American or otherwise, is not our concern here, as it seems President Trump has been mulling over the issue of copyrighted content as AI training data.

"What we really need to be successful is a simple common phrase called Common Sense and that begins with a common sense application of artificial intelligence and intellectual property rules. It is so important. You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied you're supposed to pay for. Gee, I read a book I'm supposed to pay somebody, and you know, we appreciate that, but you can't do it because it's not doable and if you're going to try and do that you're not going to have a successful program," he said in the speech.

There's no doubt some of the leading lights of AI have had the ear of the president, such as OpenAI's Sam Altman recently being swapped in for Elon Musk for one-on-one meetings. Yet underestimating Trump is a mug's game whatever your opinion of him is, and his talk of copyright in the speech had the nature of what Trump often does, relaying some of his thinking out loud, like an intellectual public pinball machine, with a number of balls out there spinning.

He continued, addressing the AI acolytes in the room: "When a person reads a book or an article, you've gained great knowledge, that does not mean you're violating copyright laws or you have to make deals with every content provider, and that's a big thing you're working on right now, I know, but you just can't do it. China's not doing it and if you're going to be beating China, right now we're leading China  very substantially in AI, very very substantially and nobody's seen the amount of work that's going to be bursting on the scene, but you have to be able to play by the same set of rules, so when you have something, when you read something, and when it goes into this vast intelligence machine, we'll call it, you cannot expect to, every time, every single time  say "OK, let's pay this one that much. let's pay this one" it just doesn't work that way."

Trump's reputation is that of a deal maker, although those that think he's purely transactional in nature are mistaken, in this case however, he's clearly thinking in terms of the few and the many. The few being AI companies, the many being all the people, businesses and organisations that hold copyright on the material the AI industry craves.

To break publishing industry ranks here, he's right. e's right as far as the impossibility of striking thousands of individual content use deals go. This can be seen from the other side too - if some publishers are striking confidential deals with AI companies, it will generally be the large ones, or those with particular and sought-after specialisms. Everyone else is just guessing as the to value of what they have and will likely get stiffed on it by the larger, richer, AI companies. It has to be said, even getting stiffed would be better than the current Attila The Hun level of free-for-all plundering we are experiencing at the moment.

The conclusion of Trump's unscripted thoughts on copyright carried on this vein: "Of course, you can't copy or plagiarise an article, but if you read an article and learn from it, we have to allow AI to use that pool of knowledge without going through the complexity of contract negotiations, of which there would be thousands for every time we use AI."

This thinking seems to me to be the broad vein of the recent judgement we saw in a US copyright case brought against Anthropic, in which Judge William Alsup said Anthropic's use of the authors' books was "exceedingly transformative" and therefore allowed under US law. Anthropic still face trial in the same case, as Alsup ruled the firm would still have to stand trial over its use of pirated copies to build its library of training data.

It's notable that US government officials have not laid out a position over the copyright issue since Trump gained power, characterising the issue as one to be decided by the law. The president himself values velocity and velocity does not come from striking thousands of small, or not small, deals.

Some expressed concern that the administration had fallen for the AI industry sweet talk: "Clearly the White House took recommendations from Big Tech CEOs, slapped a White House seal on it and patted themselves on the back,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a non-profit established to hold tech companies accountable, told the Wall Street Journal.

So is this as simple as "Trump says copyright means nothing"? Clearly not. The man is an author himself, and even Nvidia's Jensen Huang - praised lavishly during Trump's speech - cannot leverage his vast wealth to have more than one personal vote in a US election. There are groups of people Trump can afford to alienate, but he well knows who they are and it surely doesn't include every creator of original material everywhere in the United States, never mind globally.

Take his words with advisement, as the man can turn on a dime, yet it's clear his current thinking is favourable to the harvesters, not the harvested.