Artist Rights Institute is pleased to support the Human Artistry Campaign’s letter to Senators Thune and Schumer opposing the AI safe harbor in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ARI joins with:

Opposition is rooted in the most justifiable reasons:

By wiping dozens of state laws off the books, the bill would undermine public safety, creators’ rights, and the ability of local communities to protect themselves from a fast-moving technology that is being rushed to the market by tech giants. State laws protecting people from invasive AI deepfakes would be at risk, along with a range of proposals designed to eliminate discrimination and bias in AI. For artists and creators, preempting state laws requiring Big tech to disclose the material they used to train their models, often to create new products that compete with the human creators’ originals, would make it difficult or impossible to prove this theft has occurred. As the Copyright Office’s Fair Use Report recently reaffirmed, many forms of this conduct are illegal under longstanding federal law. 

The moratorium is so vague that it is unclear whether it would actually prohibit states from addressing construction of data centers or the vast drain on the power grid to implement AI placement in states. This is a safe harbor on steroids and terrible for all creators.