U.S. Copyright Office Issues Guidance On Generative AI Training

In Short

The Situation: To address the legal issues presented by artificial intelligence ("AI"), the U.S. Copyright Office ("Office") launched a multi-part Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Report ("Report") (see our Commentaries on Part One and Part Two). The Office released a prepublication version of Part Three in the series on generative AI ("GenAI") in May 2025, anticipating a final version "will be published in the near future, without any substantive changes expected in the analysis or conclusions."

The Development: Part Three focuses on a hotly contested copyright question: Do GenAI developers need to seek permission or provide compensation to use third-party copyrighted works, or can training be justified as fair use? The report describes the technical process of AI training, concludes that using copyrighted works in training may implicate copyright owners' exclusive rights, and analyzes such use under the fair use doctrine.