What Does the White House AI Action Plan Mean For Music?

On July 23, the White House released “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which combines the detail of government studies with the enthusiasm of this administration. It frames artificial intelligence technology as “an industrial revolution, an information revolution and a renaissance — all at once.”

But wait, there’s more — it could “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.” It’s unclear, both in the plan and in real life, if this is the kind of economic competitiveness that creates jobs or the kind that eliminates them — which matters because the latter could really put a damper on all that human flourishing.

For the music business, as well as the creative industries as a whole, human flourishing — as well as the flourishing of this columnist personally — depends on how artificial intelligence works from a regulatory perspective. Will AI-produced works compete with those of human creators? Will creators and rightsholders be paid fairly when AI is trained on their works? Most concerning of all, will today’s creators essentially be forced to train their replacements, without compensation? Legally, the issue at the center of this is whether AI companies need a license to use copyrighted works to train their algorithms, and it is already the subject of more than a dozen lawsuits. And the AI Action Plan doesn’t even mention it.

President Trump did, though. On July 23, at the “Winning the AI Race” summit, Trump said 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.” Coincidentally or not, this is a talking point used by some technology companies: Licensing at this scale is so complicated that it’s almost impossible, and that doing it would put the U.S. at a disadvantage compared to other countries. After all, “China’s not doing it,” Trump said. “You need to be able to play by the same set of rules.”

Trump’s phrasing here suggests that he may have been riffing on prepared remarks, as he often does. And he seemed to go back on some of what he said, saying that “you can’t copy or plagiarize from it.” This doesn’t make sense legally — it’s impossible to train an algorithm on a work without having a computer copy it. But Trump’s comments suggest that the White House may want to loosen copyright in order to ease the development of AI technology — while the fact that this isn’t in the formal plan suggests that this idea needs some selling.

The idea that copyright would inhibit the development of AI may not hold up. Collecting societies have enabled copyright licensing on a mass scale for more than 100 years, which is why almost any bar in the world can play any song ever written. (This system isn’t perfect, and it would be difficult to adapt this to AI, but it’s certainly do-able, and it’s actually pretty simple compared to, say, going to Mars.

Trump may not know this — it’s hard to know what he does know. But his worldview is based on winning — ideally in a way that someone else loses. So his attitude toward AI is going to be shaped by “Winning the AI Race,” and he’s not going to be ashamed to work the refs. If he sees copyright as an ankle weight in a road race, he’s going to want to remove it. Except that there’s only so much he can do. He already hired former PayPal executive David Sacks as an “AI and crypto czar,” and he fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, although it’s still not clear why. In the end, copyright is an issue for Congress.

A music policy executive suggested to me that Trump’s speech was a way to signal Congress that he may be interested in changing copyright law in a way that helps AI companies. This is certainly possible — it would just be hard, since the media business would oppose it. Right now, technology companies have far more power than the media business, but it’s also always easier to block a law than to pass one. This year and next year represent a good opportunity, though. Midterm elections generally favor the party that’s not in the White House, so Trump may never again have such a majority — or so much power to pressure Republican legislators. If he — and, let’s be honest, his advisors — think the same way, that gives him until the end of 2026.

If you buy into this line of reasoning — which obviously involves a fair amount of educated guesswork — plenty will happen before then. Technology companies will need to come up with an outline of a bill, legislators will need to put it forward, and it will be debated, negotiated and debated again. By that time, court decisions will give one side or the other more of an advantage. Much of that will not go according to plan — either that of the White House or of anyone else. But it offers some interesting hints about where all of this could go.