Commercial AI “goes beyond established fair use,” Copyright Office says – but the win for artists was quickly dashed with an “unprecedented power grab”

A man holds a red flag that reads "shame" outside of the Library of Congress.

Artists and AI companies have long debated a key point: Does using copyrighted material to train generative AI fall under fair use? But in the third part of an investigative analysis, the US Copyright Office has said that some types of generative AI used to create competing commercial works “goes beyond fair use boundaries.”

While many artists took the report as a win, just one day after the report was released, President Donald Trump reportedly fired the director and registrar of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter.