The Trump Administration Is Upending the AI Race. What Does That Mean for Music?
As the administration appears to be taking a more bullish stance on AI, industry experts weigh in on the possible consequences for musicians and rights holders.
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Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance represented the U.S. at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. In a speech addressing top leaders from around the world, he declared, “I think our response [to AI] is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse, but never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite. […] We believe excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off.”
Vance’s comments marked a stark shift from the Biden administration, which often spoke about weighing AI’s “profound possibilities” with its “risks,” as the former president put it in his farewell address in January. In the wake of Vance’s remarks in Paris, it’s clear that in the Trump White House, AI safety is out and the race for dominance is in. What does that mean for the music business and its quest to protect copyrights and publicity rights in the AI age?
“All the focus is on the competition with China, so national security has become the number one issue with AI in the Trump administration,” says Mitch Glazier, CEO/president of the Recording Industry Association of America. “But for our industry, it’s interesting. The [Trump administration] does seem to be saying at the same time that we also need to be ‘America First’ with our [intellectual property] too. It’s both ‘America First’ for IP and ‘America First’ for AI.”
That, Glazier thinks, provides an opportunity for the music business to continue to push its AI agenda in D.C. While the president does not have the remit to make alterations to copyright protection in the U.S., the Trump administration still has powerful sway with the Republican-dominated legislative branch, where the RIAA, the Recording Academy and others have been fighting to get new protections for music on the books. Glazier says there’s been no change in strategy there — it’s still full steam ahead, trying to get those bills passed into law in 2025.
Top copyright attorney Jacqueline Charlesworth, partner at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, still fears that Vance’s speech — as well as President Trump’s inauguration in January, where he was flanked by top executives from Apple, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet — “reflected a lot of influence from the large tech platforms.” Many major tech companies have taken the position that training their AI models on copyrights does not require consent, credit or compensation. “My concern is that creators and copyright owners will be casualties in the AI race,” she says.
For David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association, it’s still too early to totally understand the new administration’s views on copyright and AI. But, he says, “we are concerned when the language is about rushing to train these models — and that becoming a more important principle than how they are trained.”
Glazier holds out hope that Trump’s bullish approach to trade agreements with other nations could benefit American copyright owners and may influence trade partners to honor U.S. copyrights. Specifically, he points to the U.K., where the government has recently proposed granting AI companies unrestricted access to copyrighted material for training their models unless the rights holder manually opts out. Widely despised by copyright holders of all kinds, the music industry has protested the opt-out proposal in recent weeks through op-eds in national newspapers, comments to the U.K. government and through a silent album, Is This What We Want?, co-authored by a thousand U.K. artists, including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Hans Zimmer.
Organized by AI developer, musician and founder of AI safety non-profit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, Is This What We Want? features silent tracks recorded in famous studios around London to demonstrate the potential consequences of not protecting copyrighted songs. “The artists and the industry in the U.K. have done an incredible job,” says Glazier. “If for some reason the U.K. does impose this opt-out, which we think is totally unworkable, then this administration may have an opportunity to apply pressure because of a renewal of trade negotiations.”
Israelite agrees. “Much of the intellectual property fueling these AI models is American,” he says. “The U.S. tackles copyright issues all the time in trade agreements, so we are always looking into that angle of it.”
It’s not just American music industry trade groups that have been following the Trump administration’s approach to AI. Abbas Lightwalla, director of global legal policy for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the global organization representing the interests of the recorded music business, says he and his colleagues followed Vance’s Paris speech “with great interest,” and that future trade agreements between the U.S. and other nations are “absolutely on the radar,” given that IFPI advocates across the world for the music industry’s interests in trade negotiations. “It’s crucial to us that copyright is protected in every market,” he says. “It’s a cross-border issue… If the U.S. is doing the same, then I think that’s a benefit to every culture everywhere to be honest.”
Charlesworth says this struggle is nothing new; the music industry has dealt with challenges to copyright protection for decades. “In reflecting on this, I feel like, starting in the ‘90s and 2000s, the tech business had this ‘take now, pay later’ mentality to copyright. Now, it feels like it’s turned into ‘take now, and see if you can get away with it.’ It’s not even pay later.”
As the AI race continues to pick up at a rapid pace, Israelite says he’s “not that hopeful that we are going to see any kind of government action quickly that would give us guidance” — so he’s also watching the active lawsuits surrounding AI training and copyright closely and looking to the commercial space for businesses in AI and IP that are voluntarily working out solutions together. “We’re very involved and focused on partnerships with AI that can help pave the way for how this technology provides new revenue opportunities for music, not just threats,” he says.
Glazier says he’s working in the commercial marketplace, too. “We have 60 licensing agreements in place right now between AI companies and music companies,” he says. Meanwhile, the RIAA is still watching the two lawsuits it spearheaded for the three major music companies against AI music startups Suno and Udio and is working to get bills like the NO FAKES Act and NO AI FRAUD Act passed into law.
“While IP wasn’t on the radar in Vance’s speech, the aftermath of it totally shifted the conversation,” says Glazier. “We just have to keep working to protect copyrights.”
