'Terrifying Prospect': Conservative Groups Tell Court AI Giants Could Become Single Source of Information

A group of conservative organizations has asked a federal judge not to let AI companies “recklessly crawl the internet” without paying news outlets and other content providers for their work. The result of unlimited “fair use” of copyright materials in AI training would be leftist AI kingpins serving as “our sole provider of news and entertainment.”

The New York Post reports that The Center for American Rights, a right-leaning nonprofit law firm focused on tech and telecom policy, filed an amicus brief in the copyright infringement case pitting OpenAI against a coalition of news organizations including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The plaintiffs accuse OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, of stealing their content without credit or compensation to train its AI models. OpenAI’s lawyers counter that the practice is protected under the “fair use” doctrine.

Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, wrote the brief. The Article III Project and Internet Accountability Project, both led by Mike Davis, cosigned it, along with the Bull Moose Project, Consumers For A Strong Economy, and conservative lawyer Joel Thayer.

“If [superintelligence] is permitted to recklessly crawl the internet, even past paywalls, then we’ve effectively stripped these smaller companies of their competitive advantage and, worse, permanently solidified these SI companies as the ultimate distributors of our information,” the brief states. It warns further: “This completely expurgates the incentive for any creator to want to provide free, open content and solidifies SI companies as our sole provider of news and entertainment.” The filing calls that outcome “a terrifying prospect and completely at odds with the Trump Administration’s goals of protecting copyright and a diversity of viewpoints (given Big Tech’s track record of removing politically disfavored content).”

There’s a national security argument too. The brief contends that if the court accepts OpenAI’s broad reading of fair use, it would hand Chinese firms a legal shield for “distillation” attacks, in which an advanced AI model is used without permission to train a less capable one at a fraction of the normal cost and time. “If the Court here agrees with OpenAI’s expansive view of fair use, it would not only encourage foreign adversaries to continue this obvious form of IP theft but also give them legal immunity to do so,” the brief argues. OpenAI and rival Anthropic have both previously accused the Chinese firms Z.AI and DeepSeek of illegal distillation.

Suhr told the Post the filing was meant to show that protecting intellectual property and advancing AI are not at odds. “Our goal with the brief is simple – to demonstrate that an America First legal and policy approach values both SI acceleration and IP protection,” he said, adding, “Especially at a time of rampant AI tech theft by China, America First means protecting our innovative edge through real respect for IP.”

Clearly, the MAGA movement has a long history of combatting big tech censorship on social media, a fight likely to extend to AI. Suhr explains in a statement to Breitbart news that, “Conservatives know they can’t trust Big Tech to control the conversation in our democracy. As we encourage SI acceleration, we need to protect IP to ensure a healthy information ecosystem that doesn’t shrink the public square.”

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has staked out a conflicting position. Last month, the Justice Department filed a brief backing OpenAI, arguing that training AI on copyrighted material does not violate the law and that a ruling against the company “would hamper competition in the market for LLMs, because only the largest technology companies might have the capital necessary to pay licensing fees.” This is seemingly at odds with the intellectual property protections in Trump’s AI framework.

Breitbart News reported in March that the Trump administration released its AI framework, which addresses intellectual property in Point III (emphasis added by Breitbart News):

American creators, publishers, and innovators should be protected from AI generated outputs that infringe their protected content, without undermining lawful
innovation and free expression.

• Although the Administration believes that training of AI models on copyrighted material does not violate copyright laws, it acknowledges arguments to the contrary exist and therefore supports allowing the Courts to resolve this issue. Similarly, Congress should not take any actions that would impact the judiciary’s resolution of whether training on copyrighted material constitutes fair use.
• Congress should consider enabling licensing frameworks or collective rights systems for rights holders to collectively negotiate compensation from AI providers, without incurring antitrust liability. Any such legislation, however, should not address when or whether such licensing is required.
• Congress should consider establishing a federal framework protecting individuals from the unauthorized distribution or commercial use of AI-generated digital replicas of their voice, likeness, or other identifiable attributes, while providing clear exceptions for parody, satire, news reporting, and other expressive works protected by the First Amendment. Congress should prevent persons from abusing such a framework to stifle free speech online.
• Congress should continue to carefully monitor the development of copyright precedents and enforcement in the courts and evaluate whether, due to novel AI considerations, additional action beyond that proposed here is needed to fill potential gaps or provide additional protections for content creators.

Separately, the White House Office of Science and Technology published a memo in April accusing “foreign entities, principally based in China,” of waging “deliberate, industrial-scale” campaigns to steal American intellectual property. Pre-trial filings unsealed last month also showed that executives at both Microsoft and OpenAI had privately raised concerns about copyright infringement. One Microsoft director reportedly described the practice as potentially the “largest theft of labor in human history.”

Evan Swarztrauber, principal of technology policy firm CorePoint Strategies, told Breitbart News: “American AI companies can’t, or shouldn’t, have it both ways. They argue that China’s theft of their IP through distillation is a threat while simultaneously arguing that virtually all American creative IP should be up for the taking without compensation or permission. The US must have a coherent, consistent position. Our national security depends on protecting all of our IP, not just that of a few tech companies.”

The legal war over the usage of copyrighted works by AI giants impacts every author, creator, and media company in the country. Like all aspects of AI, its application in creating media presents opportunities and landmines. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.