Below is a transcript of the portion of President Trump's July 23, 2025 speech on his administration's new AI Action Plan. This excerpt captures his comments about copyright and AI.
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"And that begins with a commonsense application of artificial and intellectual property rules.
"It’s so important. You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program where every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for. “Gee, I read a book. I’m supposed to pay somebody.”
"And we appreciate that, but you just can’t do it because it’s not doable.
"And if you’re going to try and do that, you’re not going to have a successful program. I think most of the people in the room know what I mean.
"When a person reads a book or an article, you’ve gained great knowledge. That does not mean you’re violating copyright laws or have to make deals with every content provider. And that’s a big thing that you’re working on right now. I know.
"But you just can’t do it. China’s not doing it. And if you’re going to be beating China—And right now, we’re leading China very substantially in AI. Very, very substantially. And nobody’s seen the amount of work that’s going to be bursting upon the scene
"But you have to be able to play by the same set of rules. So when you have something, when you read something, and it goes into this vast intelligence machine, we’ll call it, you cannot expect to every time, every single time say, “Oh let’s pay this one that much. Let’s pay this one.” Just doesn’t work that way. Of course, you can’t copy or plagiarize an article, but if you read an article and learn from it, we have to allow AI to use that pool of knowledge without going through the complexity of contract negotiations, of which there would be thousands for every time we use AI."