More than 400 Hollywood celebrities, including the Severance director and Zoolander actor Ben Stiller, actor Mark Ruffalo, and singer-songwriter Paul McCartney, have submitted an open letter to the President Donald Trump administration opposing efforts by OpenAI and Google to weaken copyright protections for AI training.
The letter, sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy this weekend, directly challenges recent proposals from the tech giants that argue US copyright law should allow AI companies to train their systems on copyrighted works without permission or compensation to rights holders.
“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” states the letter, which was signed by numerous high-profile actors, directors, writers, and musicians including Cate Blanchett, Guillermo del Toro, and Aubrey Plaza.
The creative community’s response comes after OpenAI and Google submitted proposals suggesting that more relaxed copyright rules would strengthen America’s competitive edge in AI development against countries like China.
The Hollywood signatories strongly reject this premise, arguing that “AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”
The letter emphasizes that the…
