It’s Back: The National Defense Authorization Act Is No Place for a Backroom AI Moratorium

David Sacks Is Bringing Back the AI Moratorium

WHAT’S AT STAKE

The moratorium would block states from enforcing their own laws on AI accountability, deepfakes, consumer protection, energy policy, discrimination, and data rights. Tennessee’s ELVIS Act is a prime example. For ten years — or five years in the “softened” version — the federal government would force states to stand down while some of the most richest and powerful monopolies in commercial history continue deploying models trained on unlicensed works, scraped data, personal information, and everything in between. Regardless of whether it is ten years or five years, either may as well be an eternity in Tech World. Particularly since they don’t plan on following the law anyway with their “move fast and skip things” mentality.

Ted Turns Texas Glowing

99-1/2 just won’t do—Remember the AI moratorium that was defeated 99-1 in the Senate during the heady days of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act? We said it would come back in the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act and sure enough that’s exactly where it is courtesy of Senator and 2028 Presidential hopefull Ted Cruz (fundraising off of the Moratorium no doubt for his “Make Texas California Again” campaign) and other Big Tech sycophants according to a number of sources including Politico and the Tech Policy Press:

It…remains to be seen when exactly the moratorium issue may be taken up, though a final decision could still be a few weeks away.

Congressional leaders may either look to include the moratorium language in their initial NDAA agreement, set to be struck soon between the two chambers, or take it up as a separate amendment when it hits the floor in the House and Senate next month.

Either way, they likely will need to craft a version narrow enough to overcome the significant opposition to its initial iterations. While House lawmakers are typically able to advance measures with a simple majority or party-line vote, in the Senate, most bills require 60 votes to pass, meaning lawmakers must secure bipartisan support.

The pushback from Democrats is already underway. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), an influential figure in tech policy debates and a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, called the provision “a poison pill” in a social media post late Monday, adding, “we will block it.”

Still, the effort has the support of several top congressional Republicans, who have repeatedly expressed their desire to try again to tuck the bill into the next available legislative package.

In Washington, must-pass bills invite mischief. And right now, House leadership is flirting with the worst kind: slipping a sweeping federal moratorium on state AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

This idea was buried once already — the Senate voted 99–1 to strike it from Trump’s earlier “One Big Beautiful Bill.” But instead of accepting that outcome, Big Tech trying to resurrect it quietly, through a bill that is supposed to fund national defense, not rewrite America’s entire AI legal structure.

The NDAA is the wrong vehicle, the wrong process, and the wrong moment to hand Big Tech blanket immunity from state oversight. As we have discussed many times the first time around, the concept is probably unconstitutional for a host of reasons and will no doubt be immediately challenged.

AI Moratorium Lobbying Explainer for Your Electric Bill

Here are the key shilleries pushing the federal AI moratorium and their backers:

Lobby Shop / OrganizationSupporters / FundersRole in Pushing MoratoriumNotes
INCOMPAS / AI Competition Center (AICC)Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, telecom/cloud companiesLeads push for 10-year state-law preemption; argues moratorium prevents ‘patchwork’ lawsIdentified as central industry driver
Consumer Technology Association (CTA)Big Tech, electronics & platform economy firmsLobbying for federal preemption; opposed aggressive state AI lawsHigh influence with Commerce/Appropriations staff
American Edge ProjectMeta-backed advocacy orgFrames preemption as necessary for U.S. competitiveness vs. China; backed moratoriumUsed as indirect political vehicle for Meta
Abundance InstituteTech investors, deregulatory donorsArgues moratorium necessary for innovation; publicly predicts return of moratoriumMessaging aligns with Silicon Valley VCs
R Street InstituteMarket-oriented donors; tech-aligned fundersOriginated ‘learning period’ moratorium concept in 2024 papers by Adam ThiererNot a lobby shop but provides intellectual framework
Corporate Lobbyists (Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Meta/OpenAI/etc.)Internal lobbying shops + outside firmsPromote ‘uniform national standards’ in Congressional meetingsOperate through and alongside trade groups

PARASITES GROW IN THE DARK: WHY THE NDAA IS THE ABSOLUTE WRONG PLACE FOR THIS

The National Defense Authorization Act is one of the few bills that must pass every year. That makes it a magnet for unrelated policy riders — but it doesn’t make those riders legitimate.

An AI policy that touches free speech, energy policy and electricity rates, civil rights, state sovereignty, copyright, election integrity, and consumer safety deserves open hearings, transparent markups, expert testimony, and a real public debate. And that’s the last thing the Big Tech shills want.

THE TIMING COULD NOT BE MORE INSULTING

Big Tech is simultaneously lobbying for massive federal subsidies for compute, federal preemption of state AI rules, and multi-billion-dollar 765-kV transmission corridors to feed their exploding data-center footprints.

And who pays for those high-voltage lines? Ratepayers do. Utilities that qualify as political subdivisions in the language of the moratorium—such as municipal utilities, public power districts, and cooperative systems—set rates through their governing boards rather than state regulators. These boards must recover the full cost of service, including new infrastructure needed to meet rising demand. Under the moratorium’s carve-outs, these entities could be required to accept massive AI-driven load increases, even when those loads trigger expensive upgrades. Because cost-of-service rules forbid charging AI labs above their allocated share, the utility may have no choice but to spread those costs across all ratepayers. Residents, not the AI companies, would absorb the rate hikes.

States must retain the power to protect their citizens. Congress has every right to legislate on AI. But it does not have the right to erase state authority in secret to save Big Tech from public accountability.

A CALL TO ACTION

Tell your Members of Congress:
No AI moratorium in the NDAA.
No backroom preemption.
No Big Tech giveaways in the defense budget.

by trichordist

What We Know—and Don’t Know—About Spotify and NMPA’s “Opt-In” Audiovisual Deal

When Spotify and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) announced an “opt-in” audiovisual licensing portal this month, the headlines made it sound like a breakthrough for independent songwriters. In reality, what we have is a bare-bones description of a direct-license program whose key financial and legal terms remain hidden from view.

Here’s what we do know. The portal (likely an HFA extravaganza) opened on November 11, 2025 and will accept opt-ins through December 19. Participation is limited to NMPA member publishers, and the license covers U.S. audiovisual uses—that is, music videos and other visual elements Spotify is beginning to integrate into its platform. It smacks of the side deal on pending and unmatched tied to frozen mechanicals that the CRB rejected in Phonorecords IV.

Indeed, one explanation for the gun decked opt-in period is in The Desk:

Spotify is preparing to launch music videos in the United States, expanding a feature that has been in beta in nearly 100 international markets since January, the company quietly confirmed this week.

The new feature, rolling out to Spotify subscribers in the next few weeks, will allow streaming audio fans to watch official music videos directly within the Spotify app, setting the streaming platform in more direct competition with YouTube.

The company calls it a way for indies to share in “higher royalties,” but no rates, formulas, or minimum guarantees have been disclosed so it’s hard to know “higher” compared to what? Yes, it’s true that if you evan made another 1¢ that would be “higher”—and in streaming-speak, 1¢ is big progress, but remember that it’s still a positive number to the right of the decimal place preceded by a zero.

The deal sits alongside Spotify’s major-publisher audiovisual agreements, which are widely believed to include large advances and broader protections—none of which apply here. There’s also an open question of whether the majors granted public performance rights as an end run around PROs, which I fully expect. There’s no MFN clause, no public schedule, and no audit details. I would be surprised if Spotify agreed to be audited by an independent publisher and even more surprised if the announced publishers with direct deals did not have an audit right. So there’s one way we can be pretty confident this is not anything like MFN terms aside from the scrupulous avoidance of mentioning the dirty word: MONEY.

But it would be a good guess that Spotify is interested in this arrangement because it fills out some of the most likely plaintiffs to protect them when they launch their product with unlicensed songs or user generated videos and no Content ID clone (which is kind of Schrödinger’s UGC—not expressly included in the deal but not expressly excluded either, and would be competitive with TikTok or Spotify nemesis YouTube).

But here’s what else we don’t know: how much these rights are worth, how royalties will be calculated, whether they include public performances to block PRO licensing of Spotify A/V (and which could trigger MFN problems with YouTube or other UGC services) and whether the December 19 date marks the end of onboarding—or the eve of a US product launch. And perhaps most importantly, how is it that NMPA is involved, the NMPA which has trashed Spotify far and wide over finally taking advantage of the bundling rates negotiated in the CRB (indeed in some version since 2009). Shocked, shocked that there’s bundling going on.

It’s one thing to talk about audiovisual covering “official” music videos and expressly stating that the same license will not be used to cover UGC no way, no how. Given Spotify’s repeated hints that full-length music videos are coming to the U.S. and the test marketing reported by The Desk and disclosed by Spotify itself, the absolute silence of the public statements about royalty rates and UGC, as well as the rush to get publishers to opt in before year-end all suggest that rollout is imminent. Until Spotify and the NMPA release the actual deal terms, though, we’re all flying blind—sheep being herded toward an agreement cliff we can’t fully see.

[A version of this post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy]

by Trichordist Editor

@DavidSacks Isn’t a Neutral Observer—He’s an Architect of the AI Circular-Investment Maze

When White House AI Czar David Sacks tweets confidently that “there will be no federal bailout for AI” because “five major frontier model companies” will simply replace each other, he is not speaking as a neutral observer. He is speaking as a venture capitalist with overlapping financial ties to the very AI companies now engaged in the most circular investment structure Silicon Valley has engineered since the dot-com bubble—but on a scale measured not in millions or even billions, but in trillions.

Sacks is a PayPal alumnus turned political-tech kingmaker who has positioned himself at the intersection of public policy and private AI investment. His recent stint as a Special Government Employee to the federal government raised eyebrows precisely because of this dual role. Yet he now frames the AI sector as a robust ecosystem that can absorb firm-level failure without systemic consequence.

The numbers say otherwise. The diagram circulating in the X-thread exposes the real structure: mutually dependent investments tied together through cross-equity stakes, GPU pre-purchases, cloud-compute lock-ins, and stock-option-backed revenue games. So Microsoft invests in OpenAI; OpenAI pays Microsoft for cloud resources; Microsoft books the revenue and inflates its stake OpenAI. Nvidia invests in OpenAI; OpenAI buys tens of billions in Nvidia chips; Nvidia’s valuation inflates; and that valuation becomes the collateral propping up the entire sector. Oracle buys Nvidia chips; OpenAI signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle; Oracle books the upside. Every player’s “growth” relies on every other player’s spending.

This is not competition. It is a closed liquidity loop. And it’s a repeat of the dot-bomb “carriage” deals that contributed to the stock market crash in 2000.

And underlying all of it is the real endgame: a frantic rush to secure taxpayer-funded backstops—through federal energy deals, subsidized data-center access, CHIPS-style grants, or Department of Energy land leases—to pay for the staggering infrastructure costs required to keep this circularity spinning. The singularity may be speculative, but the push for a public subsidy to sustain it is very real.

Call it what it is: an industry searching for a government-sized safety net while insisting it doesn’t need one.

In the meantime, the circular investing game serves another purpose: it manufactures sky-high paper valuations that can be recycled into legal war chests. Those inflated asset values are now being used to bankroll litigation and lobbying campaigns aimed at rewriting copyright, fair use, and publicity law so that AI firms can keep strip-mining culture without paying for it.

The same feedback loop that props up their stock prices is funding the effort to devalue the work of every writer, musician, actor, and visual artist on the planet—and to lock that extraction in as a permanent feature of the digital economy.

by Trichordist

Don’t Let Congress Reward the Stations That Don’t Pay Artists

As we’ve been posting about for years—alongside Blake Morgan and the #IRespectMusic movement that you guys have been so good about supporting—there’s still a glaring failure at the heart of U.S. copyright law: performing artists and session musicians receive no royalty for AM/FM radio airplay. Every other developed country (and practically every other country) compensates performers for broadcast use, yet the United States continues to exempt terrestrial radio from paying the people who record the music.

Now Congress is preparing to pass the AM Radio in Every Car Act, a massive government intervention that would literally install the instrument of unfairness into every new car at significant cost to consumers. It’s a breathtaking example of how far the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) will go to preserve its century-old free ride—by lobbying for public subsidies while refusing to pay artists a penny. This isn’t public service; it’s policy cruelty dressed up as nostalgia.

Hundreds of artists have already spoken out in a letter to Congress demanding fairness through the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA). Their action matters—and yours does too.

👉 Here’s what you can do:

Don’t let Washington hard-wire injustice into every dashboard. Demand that Congress fix the problem before it funds the next generation of unfairness.

Dear Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, Leader Thune, and Leader Schumer:

Earlier this year, we wrote urging that you take action on the American Music Fairness Act (S.253/H.R.791), legislation that will require that AM/FM radio companies start paying artists for their music. We are grateful for your attention to ensuring America’s recording artists are finally paid for use of our work.

As you may know, some members of Congress are currently seeking to pass legislation that will require every new vehicle manufactured in the United States come pre-installed with AM radio. The passage of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (S.315/H.R.979) would mark another major windfall for the corporate radio industry that makes $13.6 billion each year in advertising revenue while refusing to compensate the performers whose songs play 240 million times each year on AM radio stations. Every year, recording artists lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties in the U.S. and abroad because of this hundred-year-old loophole.

This is wrong. In the United States of America, every person deserves to be paid for the use of their work. But because of the power held by giant radio corporations in Washington, artists, both big and small, continue to be overlooked, even as every other music delivery platform, including streaming services and satellite radio, pays both the songwriter and performer.

We are asking today that you insist that any legislation that includes the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act also include the American Music Fairness Act. We do not oppose terrestrial radio. In fact, we appreciate the role that radio has played in our careers and within society, but the 100-year-old argument of promotion that radio continues to hide behind does not ring true in 2025.

When you save the radio industry by mandating its technology remain in cars, we ask that you save the musician too and allow us to be paid fairly when our music is played.

Thank you again for your consideration of this much-needed legislation.

Sincerely,

Barry Manilow

Boyz II Men

Carole King

Cyndi Lauper

Debbie Gibson

Def Leppard

Gloria Gaynor

Kool and the Gang

Lee Ann Womack

Lil Jon

Mike Love

Nancy Wilson

Peter Frampton

Sammy Hagar

Smokey Robinson

TLC

by Trichordist Editor

There Is No ‘Right to Train’: How AI Labs Are Trying to Manufacture a Safe Harbor for Theft

Every few months, an AI company wins a procedural round in court or secures a sympathetic sound bite about “transformative fair use.” Within hours, the headlines declare a new doctrine of spin: the right to train AI on copyrighted works. But let’s be clear — no such right exists and probably never will.  That doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying.

A “right to train” is not found anywhere in the Copyright Act or any other law.  It’s also not found in court cases on fair-use that the AI lobby leans on. It’s a slogan and it’s spin, not a statute. What we’re watching is a coordinated effort by the major AI labs to manufacture a safe harbor through litigation — using every favorable fair-use ruling to carve out what looks like a precedent for blanket immunity.  Then they’ll get one of their shills in Congress or a state legislature to introduce legislation as though a “right to train” was there all along.

How the “Right to Train” Narrative Took Shape

The phrase first appeared in tech-industry briefs and policy papers describing model training as a kind of “machine learning fair use.” The logic goes like this: since humans can read a book and learn from it, a machine should be able to “learn” from the same book without permission.

That analogy collapses under scrutiny. First of all, humans typically bought the book they read or checked it out from a library.  Humans don’t make bit-for-bit copies of everything they read, and they don’t reproduce or monetize those copies at global scale. AI training does exactly that — storing expressive works inside model weights, then re-deploying them to generate derivative material.

But the repetitive chant of the term “right to train” serves a purpose: to normalize the idea that AI companies are entitled to scrape, store, and replicate human creativity without consent. Each time a court finds a narrow fair-use defense in a context that doesn’t involve piracy or derivative outputs (because they lose on training on stolen goods like in the Anthropic and Meta cases), the labs and their shills trumpet it as proof that training itself is categorically protected. It isn’t and no court has ever ruled that it is and likely never will.

Fair Use Is Not a Safe Harbor

Fair use is a case-by-case defense to copyright infringement, not a standing permission slip. It weighs purpose, amount, transformation, and market effect — all of which vary depending on the facts. But AI companies are trying to convert that flexible doctrine into a brand new safe harbor: a default assumption that all training is fair use unless proven otherwise.  They love a safe harbor in Silicon Valley and routinely abuse them like Section 230, the DMCA and Title I of the Music Modernization Act.

That’s exactly backward. The Copyright Office’s own report makes clear that the legality of training depends on how the data was acquired and what the model does with it.  A developer who trains on pirated or paywalled material like Anthropic, Meta and probably all of them to one degree or another, can’t launder infringement through the word “training.”

Even if courts were to recognize limited fair use for truly lawful training, that protection would never extend to datasets built from pirate websites, torrent mirrors, or unlicensed repositories like Sci-Hub, Z-Library, or Common Crawl’s scraped paywalls—more on the scummy Common Crawl another time. The DMCA’s safe harbors don’t protect platforms that knowingly host stolen goods — and neither would any hypothetical “right to train.”

Yet a safe harbor is precisely what the labs are seeking: a doctrine that would retroactively bless mass infringement like Spotify got in the Music Modernization Act and preempt accountability for the sources they used.  

And not only do they want a safe harbor — they want it for free.  No licenses, no royalties, no dataset audits, no compensation. What do they want?  FREE STUFF.  When do they want it?  NOW!  Just blanket immunity, subsidized by every artist, author, and journalist whose work they ingested without consent or payment.

The Real Motive Behind the Push

The reason AI companies need a “right to train” is simple: without it, they have no reliable legal basis for the data that powers their models and they are too cheap to pay and to careless to take the time to license. Most of their “training corpora” were built years before any licenses were contemplated — scraped from the open web, archives, and pirate libraries under the assumption that no one would notice.

This is particularly important for books.  Training on books is vital for AI models because books provide structured, high-quality language, complex reasoning, and deep cultural context. They teach models coherence, logic, and creativity that short-form internet text lacks. Without books, AI systems lose depth, nuance, and the ability to understand sustained argument, narrative, and style. 

Without books, AI labs have no business.  That’s why they steal books.  Very simple, really.

Now that creators are suing, the labs are trying to reverse-engineer legitimacy. They want to turn each court ruling that nudges fair use in their direction into a brick in the wall of a judicially-manufactured safe harbor — one that Congress never passed and rights-holders never agreed to and would never agree to.

But safe harbors are meant to protect good-faith intermediaries who act responsibly once notified of infringement. AI labs are not intermediaries; they are direct beneficiaries. Their entire business model depends on retaining the stolen data permanently in model weights that cannot be erased.  The “right to train” is not a right — it’s a rhetorical weapon to make theft sound inevitable and a demand from the richest corporations in commercial history for yet another government-sponsored subsidy of infringement by bad actors.

The Myth of the Inevitable Machine

AI’s defenders claim that training on copyrighted works is as natural as human learning. But there’s nothing natural about hoarding other people’s labor at planetary scale and calling it innovation. The truth is simpler: the “right to train” is a marketing term invented to launder unlawful data practices into respectability.

If courts and lawmakers don’t call it what it is — a manufactured, safe harbor for piracy to benefit some of the biggest free riders who ever snarfed down corporate welfare — then history will repeat itself. What Grokster tried to do with distribution, AI is trying to do with cognition: privatize the world’s creative output and claim immunity for the theft.

by thetrichordist

“You don’t need to train on novels and pop songs to get the benefits of AI in science” @ednewtonrex

You Don’t Need to Steal Art to Cure Cancer: Why Ed Newton-Rex Is Right About AI and Copyright

Ed Newton-Rex said the quiet truth out loud: you don’t need to scrape the world’s creative works to build AI that saves lives. Or even beat the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s a myth that AI “has to” ingest novels and pop lyrics to learn language. Models acquire syntax, semantics, and pragmatics from any large, diverse corpus of natural language. That includes transcribed speech, forums, technical manuals, government documents, Wikipedia, scientific papers, and licensed conversational data. Speech systems learn from audio–text pairs, not necessarily fiction; text models learn distributional patterns wherever language appears. Of course, literary works can enrich style, but they’re not necessary for competence: instruction tuning, dialogue data, and domain corpora yield fluent models without raiding copyrighted art. In short, creative literature is optional seasoning, not the core ingredient for teaching machines to “speak.”

Google’s new cancer-therapy paper proves the point. Their model wasn’t trained on novels, lyrics, or paintings. It was trained responsibly on scientific data. And yet it achieved real, measurable progress in biomedical research. That simple fact dismantles one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent myths: that copyright is somehow an obstacle to innovation.

You don’t need to train on Joni Mitchell to discover a new gene pathway. You don’t need to ingest John Coltrane to find a drug target. AI used for science can thrive within the guardrails of copyright because science itself already has its own open-data ecosystems—peer-reviewed, licensed, and transparent.

The companies like Anthropic and Meta insisting that “fair use” covers mass ingestion of stolen creative works aren’t curing diseases; they’re training entertainment engines. They’re ripping off artists’ livelihoods to make commercial chatbots, story generators, and synthetic-voice platforms designed to compete against the very creators whose works they exploited. That’s not innovation—it’s market capture through appropriation.

They do it for reasons old as time—they do it for the money.

The ethical divide is clear:

  • AI for discovery builds on licensed scientific data.
  • AI for mimicry plunders culture to sell imitation.

We should celebrate the first and regulate the second. Upholding copyright and requiring provenance disclosures doesn’t hinder progress—it restores integrity. The same society that applauds AI in medical breakthroughs can also insist that creative industries remain human-centered and law-abiding. Civil-military fusion doesn’t imply that there’s only two ingredients in the gumbo of life.

If Google can advance cancer research without stealing art, so can everyone else and so can Google keep different rules for the entertainment side of their business or investment portfolio. The choice isn’t between curing cancer and protecting artists—it’s between honesty and opportunism. The repeated whinging of AI labs about “because China” would be a lot more believable if they used their political influence to get the CCP to release Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai from stir. We can join Jimmy and his amazingly brave son Sebastian and say “because China”, too. #FreeJimmyLai

by Trichordist

Sir Lucian Grainge Just Drew the Brightest Line Yet on AI

by Chris Castle

Universal Music Group’s CEO Sir Lucian Grainge has put the industry on notice in an internal memo to Universal employees: UMG will not license any AI model that uses an artist’s voice—or generates new songs incorporating an artist’s existing songs—without that artist’s consent. This isn’t just a slogan; it’s a licensing policy, an advocacy position, and a deal-making leverage all rolled into one. After the Sora 2 disaster, I have to believe that OpenAI is at the top of the list.

Here’s the memo:

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing today to update you on the progress that we are making on our efforts to take advantage of the developing commercial opportunities presented by Gen AI technology for the benefit of all our artists and songwriters.

I want to address three specific topics:

Responsible Gen AI company and product agreements; How our artists can participate; and What we are doing to encourage responsible AI public policies.

UMG is playing a pioneering role in fostering AI’s enormous potential. While our progress is significant, the speed at which this technology is developing makes it important that you are all continually updated on our efforts and well-versed on the strategy and approach.

The foundation of what we’re doing is the belief that together, we can foster a healthy commercial AI ecosystem in which artists, songwriters, music companies and technology companies can all flourish together.

NEW AGREEMENTS

To explore the varied opportunities and determine the best approaches, we have been working with AI developers to put their ideas to the test. In fact, we were the first company to enter into AI-related agreements with companies ranging from major platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Meta to emerging entrepreneurs such as BandLab, Soundlabs, and more. Both creatively and commercially our portfolio of AI partnerships continues to expand.

Very recently, Universal Music Japan announced an agreement with KDDI, a leading Japanese telecommunications company, to develop new music experiences for fans and artists using Gen AI. And we are very actively engaged with nearly a dozen different companies on significant new products and service plans that hold promise for a dramatic expansion of the AI music landscape. Further, we’re seeing other related advancements. While just scratching the surface of AI’s enormous potential, Spotify’s recent integration with ChatGPT offers a pathway to move fluidly from query and discovery to enjoyment of music—and all within a monetized ecosystem.

HOW OUR ARTISTS CAN PARTICIPATE

Based on what we’ve done with our AI partners to date, and the new discussions that are underway, we can unequivocally say that AI has the potential to deliver creative tools that will enable us to connect our artists with their fans in new ways—and with advanced capability on a scale we’ve never encountered.

Further, I believe that Agentic AI, which dynamically employs complex reasoning and adaptation, has the potential to revolutionize how fans interact with and discover music.

I know that we will successfully navigate as well as seize these opportunities and that these new products could constitute a significant source of new future revenue for artists and songwriters.

We will be actively engaged in discussing all of these developments with the entire creative community.

While some of the biggest opportunities will require further exploration, we are excited by the compelling AI models we’re seeing emerge.

We will only consider advancing AI products based on models that are trained responsibly. That is why we have entered into agreements with AI developers such as ProRata and KLAY, among others, and are in discussions with numerous additional like-minded companies whose products provide accurate attribution and tools which empower and compensate artists—products that both protect music and enhance its monetization.

And to be clear—and this is very important—we will NOT license any model that uses an artist’s voice or generates new songs which incorporate an artist’s existing songs without their consent.

New AI products will be joined by many other similar ones that will soon be coming to market, and we have established teams throughout UMG that will be working with artists and their representatives to bring these opportunities directly to them.

RESPONSIBLE PUBLIC POLICIES COVERING AI

We remain acutely aware of the fact that large and powerful AI companies are pressuring governments around the world to legitimize the training of AI technology on copyrighted material without owner consent or compensation, among other proposals.

To be clear: all these misguided proposals amount to nothing more than the unauthorized (and, we believe, illegal) exploitation of the rights and property of creative artists.

In addition, we are acting in the marketplace to see our partners embrace responsible and ethical AI policies and we’re proud of the progress being made there. For example, having accurately predicted the rapid rise of AI “slop” on streaming platforms, in 2023 we introduced Artist-Centric principles to combat what is essentially platform pollution. Since then, many of our platform partners have made significant progress in putting in place measures to address the diversion of royalties, infringement and fraud—all to the benefit of the entire music ecosystem.

We commend our partners for taking action to address this urgent issue, consistent with our Artist-Centric approach. Further, we recently announced an agreement with SoundPatrol, a new company led by Stanford scientists that employs patented technology to protect artists’ work from unauthorized use in AI music generators.

We are confident that by displaying our willingness as a community to embrace those commercial AI models which value and enhance human artistry, we are demonstrating that market-based solutions promoting innovation are the answer.

LEADING THE WAY FORWARD

So, as we work to assure safeguards for artists, we will help lead the way forward, which is why we are exploring and finding innovative ways to use this revolutionary technology to create new commercial opportunities for artists and songwriters while simultaneously aiding and protecting human creativity.

I’m very excited about the products we’re seeing and what the future holds. I will update you all further on our progress.

Lucian

Mr. Grainge’s position reframes the conversation from “Can we scrape?” to “How do we get consent and compensate?” That shift matters because AI that clones voices or reconstitutes catalog works is not a neutral utility—it’s a market participant competing with human creators and the rights they rely on.

If everything is “transformative” then nothing is protected—and that guts not just copyright, but artists’ name–image–likeness (NIL), right of publicity and in some jurisdictions, moral rights. A scrape-first, justify-later posture erases ownership, antagonizes creators living and dead, and makes catalogs unpriceable. Why would Universal—or any other rightsholder—partner with a company that treats works and identity as free training fuel? What’s great about Lucian’s statement is he’s putting a flag in the ground: the industry leader will not do business with bad actors, regardless of the consequences.

What This Means in Practice

  1. Consent as the gate. Voice clones and “new songs” derived from existing songs require affirmative artist approval—full stop.
  2. Provenance as the standard. AI firms that want first-party deals must prove lawful ingestion, audited datasets, and enforceable guardrails against impersonation.
  3. Aligned incentives. Where consent exists, there’s room for discovery tools, creator utilities, and new revenue streams; where it doesn’t, there’s no deal.

Watermarks and “AI-generated” labels don’t cure false endorsement, right-of-publicity violations, or market substitution. Platforms that design, market, or profit from celebrity emulation without consent aren’t innovating—they’re externalizing legal and ethical risk onto artists.

Moral Rights: Why This Resonates Globally

Universal’s consent-first stance will resonate in moral-rights jurisdictions where authors and performers hold inalienable rights of attribution and integrity (e.g., France’s droit moral, Germany’s Urheberpersönlichkeitsrecht). AI voice clones and “sound-alike” outputs can misattribute authorship, distort a creator’s artistic identity, or subject their work to derogatory treatment—classic moral-rights harms. Because many countries recognize post-mortem moral rights and performers’ neighboring rights, the “no consent, no license” rule is not just good governance—it’s internationally compatible rights stewardship.

Industry Leadership vs. the “Opt-Out” Mirage

It is absolutely critical that the industry leader actively opposes the absurd “opt-out” gambit and other sleights of hand Big Technocrats are pushing to drive a Mack truck through so-called text-and-data-mining loopholes. Their playbook is simple: legitimize mass training on copyrighted works first, then dare creators to find buried settings or after-the-fact exclusions. That flips property rights on their head and is essentially a retroactive safe harbor,

As Mr. Grainge notes, large AI companies are pressuring governments to bless training on copyrighted material without owner consent or compensation. Those proposals amount to the unauthorized—and unlawful—exploitation of artists’ rights and property. By refusing to play along, Universal isn’t just protecting its catalog; it’s defending the baseline principle that creative labor isn’t scrapable.

Consent or Nothing

Let’s be honest: if AI labs were serious about licensing, we wouldn’t have come one narrow miss away from a U.S. state law AI moratorium triggered by their own overreach. That wasn’t just a safe harbor for copyright infringement, that was a safe harbor for everything from privacy, to consumer protection, to child exploitation, to everything. That’s why it died 99-1 in the Senate, but it was a close run thing,,

And realize, that’s exactly what they want when they are left to their own devices, so to speak. The “opt-out” mirage, the scraping euphemisms, and the rush to codify TDM loopholes all point the same direction—avoid consent and avoid compensation. Universal’s position is the necessary counterweight: consent-first, provenance-audited, revenue-sharing with artists and songwriters (and I would add nonfeatured artists and vocalists) or no deal. Anything less invites regulatory whiplash, a race-to-the-bottom for human creativity, and a permanent breach of trust with artists and their estates.

Reading between the lines, Mr. Grainge has identified AI as both a compelling opportunity and an existential crisis. Let’s see if the others come with him and stare down the bad guys.

And YouTube is monetizing Sora videos

[This post first appeared on Artist Rights Watch]

by Trichordist Editor