China is racing to outpace the United States in artificial intelligence development and deployment, and it is making progress. To stay ahead, America needs a national innovation strategy that strengthens all the pillars of our leadership, from data and infrastructure to talent and adoption. Thankfully, political leaders on both sides of the aisle are waking up to the intensity and importance of this race, and many are implementing innovative policies to ensure America maintains its edge.
If the United States wants to lead in AI, it needs a national innovation strategy grounded in four parts:
—Policy Clarity: Freeze patchwork state regulations and preserve pro-growth legal frameworks, including supporting antitrust law that fosters growth and maintaining the current “fair use” copyright law to help catalyze innovation.
—Infrastructure: Build the computer power, energy and data systems needed to train and deploy AI at scale.
—Talent: Invest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education, upskilling, and skilled trades to propel innovation.
—Adoption: Ensure our AI models are adopted at home and abroad so that American values, creativity and innovation continue to underpin the global tech infrastructure, rather than China’s authoritarian vision.
For 50 years, fair use has allowed creators, educators, researchers and entrepreneurs to use snippets of copyright material to produce transformative inventions, and not just market substitutes for the original. In the early days of the internet, fair use was the legal bedrock that enabled search engines to index the web, web archives to preserve knowledge, and platforms to build global communities. The law worked well to expand innovation and benefit the public, including by enabling researchers to use academic texts and developers to train early AI models on diverse, real-world content.
We didn’t strangle the internet in its infancy with impossible licensing requirements, and we shouldn’t make that mistake now with AI. Today’s large language models use vast public datasets to learn how language, code and medicine work, not to reproduce them but to understand and create ideas and solutions to our most pressing societal problems.
Access to this data is essential to modern AI-powered tools that allow small businesses to grow, doctors to discover treatments, and students to learn through personalized content. That’s precisely the kind of innovation Congress intended to protect with fair use. And it’s the kind of innovation we can’t choke off if we want America and our values to keep leading the world.
While some are challenging this longstanding principle, China is using every speck of data possible to train its AI models and to get a leg up in our fierce competition. That includes public data, government surveillance feeds, and personal information.
China is pouring $1.4 trillion into advanced technologies, including AI. It also uses hacking and spying to capture $500 billion in American tech and trade secrets annually, and is now using AI to export suppression, surveillance and political control globally.
The stakes are high: Newsweek recently exposed how China is training AI to manage simulated cities, tightly controlling speech, behavior and movement according to Communist Party values. If Chinese models become the global standard, we’ll see freedoms erode worldwide.
Some want to force every AI developer to get explicit permission — and pay licensing fees — for every piece of content used in training models. This would break from precedent, kneecap innovation, bankrupt startups, and could hand China a lasting edge in global tech leadership.
Today, there are more than 30 lawsuits against AI companies alleging that using copyright material to train models constitutes willful infringement. Some plaintiffs are asking courts for multibillion-dollar fines that would effectively shut down dozens of U.S. firms overnight, an outcome that China would welcome with open arms.
If these lawsuits succeed, or if Congress radically rewrites the law, it will become nearly impossible for startups, universities or mid-size firms to develop competitive AI tools. U.S. firms could move to more favorable foreign jurisdictions, driving jobs, talent and capital out of the United States. Such changes could also damage America’s open-source AI movement, one of our strongest checks against the global spread of Chinese technology.
America’s tech leadership is under threat from Beijing to Brussels: China seeks AI dominance while the EU punishes American innovation through overregulation. Meanwhile, our lawmakers have introduced more than 1,000 AI-related bills in state legislatures this year.
Maintaining our fair use framework supports American creativity and technological leadership. If we eliminate it, we will unintentionally hobble our innovators and allow China to surge ahead, risk more dependence on foreign technology, have less freedom in the digital space, and face a global playing field redefined by authoritarian actors. Fair use has been, and continues to be, a cornerstone of American innovation. If we want to win the AI future, we must ensure this critical component of copyright law remains intact.