Will Hollywood Creatives’ Letter to Trump Protect Copyrighted Works from AI?

Published: March 20, 2025

Will Hollywood Creatives’ Letter to Trump Protect Copyrighted Works from AI?

By Movieguide® Contributor

Over 400 Hollywood celebrities and creatives have signed a petition urging President Donald Trump not to loosen AI copyright regulations.

“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the letter, signed by the likes of Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cate Blanchett and Ron Howard, said.

“America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually, while providing the foundation for American democratic influence and soft power abroad,” the 12-page letter continues. “But 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 comes after OpenAI and Google urged the government to removed “all legal protections and existing guardrails surrounding copyright law protections for the training of Artificial Intelligence,” per CBS News.

The companies are “arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds,” the letter claims. “There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish.”

Both OpenAI and Google have been vocal about how they want to use AI in letters written to the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

OpenAI proposes “A regulatory strategy that ensures the freedom to innovate, ‭an export control strategy that exports democratic AI, a copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn, a strategy to seize the infrastructure opportunity to drive growth, and an ambitious government adoption strategy.”

Meanwhile, Google suggests that less regulated copyright laws would offer better ways to train AI “without significantly impacting rights holders.”

As the global AI arms race heats up, Hollywood hopes to protect creativity from the exploitation of AI. It remains to be seen how the technology’s role in entertainment will play out.