Trump Fires Copyright Chief After Report Sparks Questions on AI Training

The U.S. President Donald Trump has dismissed Shira Perlmutter, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office.

This dismissal was reported by CBS News and Politico and appears to be confirmed by a statement from Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee.

"Donald Trump's firing of Copyright Registrar Shira Perlmutter is a blatant, unprecedented power grab that disregards the rule of law," Morelle said. "There is no doubt he acted less than a day after she refused to endorse Elon Musk's AI model training plan."

Perlmutter took over the Copyright Office in 2020 during Trump's first term. She was appointed by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, whom Trump also dismissed this week.

Trump referenced the news on his social network Truth Social when he "reposted" a link to a CBS News article shared by attorney Mike Davis. (Confusingly, Davis seemed to criticize the dismissal, writing, "Now tech moguls will attempt to steal creators' copyrights for AI profits.")

Regarding how this connects to Musk (an ally of Trump) and AI, Morelle linked to a pre-release version of a U.S. Copyright Office report released this week, focusing on copyright and artificial intelligence. (In fact, this is actually the third part of a longer report.)

In the report, the Copyright Office stated that while it is "impossible to predict" the outcomes of individual cases, reliance on "fair use" as a defense by AI companies training their models on copyrighted content has limitations. For instance, research and analysis may be permissible.

"However, using vast amounts of copyrighted works for commercial purposes to produce expressive content that competes with existing markets, especially when achieved through unauthorized access, exceeds established fair use boundaries," the report continued.

The Copyright Office further recommended that government intervention "is premature at this time," but expressed hope that a "licensing market" would continue to evolve, with AI companies paying copyright holders for content access. It added that "alternative approaches such as extended collective licensing should be considered to address any market failures."

AI companies, including OpenAI, are currently facing multiple lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement. OpenAI has also called on the U.S. government to develop a copyright strategy that grants AI companies some freedom through fair use.

Meanwhile, Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI and founder of a competing startup xAI (which is merging with the former Twitter), recently expressed support for Square founder Jack Dorsey’s call to "abolish all intellectual property laws."