The RIAA is coming for AI. The litigious organization representing the major record labels sued AI music generators Suno and Udio, and some are predicting that it could give platforms “a lesson in hubris” when it comes to how fast and loose they’ve approached copyrighted work.
AI companies might be ignoring other rules. AI search engine Perplexity has been fending off accusations from Forbes and Wired that it has been stealing their content. The claim is that Perplexity is ignoring robots.txt — a file that websites use to tell bots, search engines, and web scrapers what they are and are not allowed to access — which might violate its contract with Amazon. Business Insider reported last week that OpenAI and Anthropic were doing the same.
Regardless of their argument, the stakes are big. Most tech companies have maintained two things: that “learning” from content does not count as copying it, and that developing AI wouldn’t be viable if it fell under copyright. Google, Microsoft, and Cohere told the Canadian government as much this week when they argued that AI should be exempt from any updates to the Copyright Act, which could make the grey area AI has operated in more explicit.