• OpenAI wants the US to allow it and other US AI firms to use copyright content to train their technology.
• The company says that current laws make it impossible to compete with Chinese companies who can more easily ignore those same laws.
• The company also wants the chance to defend the US from cyber attacks.

The US, for better or for worse, wants to be a superpower in the realm of AI, at least, that’s the opinion of the current presidency and his big tech cabal.

As we know, AI isn’t the most honest way to make a buck. Nearly any model that was trained on a large corpus of data has been legally challenged in lawsuits claiming these models ignored copyright protections in order to acquire books, movies, and even social media posts to train their chatbots and terrible art machines.

In fact, OpenAI admitted that if it wasn’t allowed to steal data to train its models, it wouldn’t be the billion-dollar entity it is today. 

Now OpenAI is hoping the current US president will make American AI’s theft of copyright-protected material legal.

In a blog post proposing how the US could become an AI leader, OpenAI suggests the creation of a copyright strategy that kneecaps any AI developer beyond the US.

“America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security. The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material,” says OpenAI.

OpenAI is very worried about China and its flouting of US law. We suspect that it’s far easier for a US citizen to sue a US company for copyright infringement than it is for that US citizen to learn Mandarin to learn about a tool in China that could be stealing their content to train an AI bot and launching a lawsuit in a foreign country that isn’t best mates with the US.

Furthermore, OpenAI argues that regulation would stifle the advancing war drum of AI.

But wait, there is more.

OpenAI reckons that it and other US AI firms should have access to “the tools and classified threat intelligence to mitigate national security risks” which is concerning.

The company believes that these tools can help it address threats the US faces online with greater efficiency than the incumbents can. We may not be experts but giving an AI company whose tools are prone to making mistakes and just making things up, access to government-level security tools just sounds like a bad idea.

These are just a peek at OpenAI’s charge to become the biggest AI company in the world. While the company argues on behalf of AI companies in the US, it’s clear that its own interests are front and center. You can read its proposal in full in this PDF here.

It’s not clear if the US president will take this proposal seriously. We are concerned that if he does, the landscape could shift dramatically. With that in mind, the US isn’t exactly welcoming new allies and we have to wonder whether taking this tack in an emerging market is good for business.