Hawley-Blumenthal Bill Aims to Rein in AI Companies’ Use of Copyrighted Works

Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Monday, July 21, introduced the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which would chiefly bar artificial intelligence (AI) companies from using copyrighted works to train their generative AI tools without authors’ permission.

The bill was announced less than a week after Hawley held a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism in which he called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history.”

The AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act would create a federal tort for data misuse that would allow “individuals to sue any person or company that appropriates, uses, sells, or exploits their personal data or copyrighted works without clear, affirmative consent.”

It would also require that AI companies disclose everyone who might have access to a creator’s data if they do consent to have their works used and would provide relief in the form of “compensatory damages in an amount equal to the greater of—(i) actual damages; (ii) treble any profits from the appropriation, use, collection, processing, sale, or other exploitation of the covered data of the individual as described in subsection(a); or (iii) $1,000; (B) punitive damages; (C) injunctive relief; and (D) attorney’s fees and costs.”

Commenting on the bill on Monday, Hawley said that “AI companies are robbing the American people blind while leaving artists, writers, and other creators with zero recourse.” Blumenthal added that the bill “embodies a bipartisan consensus that AI safeguards are urgent—because the technology is moving at accelerating speed, and so are dangers to privacy.”

In last week’s hearing, one witness suggested the courts should be left to sort out the proper balance of interests with respect to AI training, but Hawley disagreed, pointing to emails that have been made public in a case between authors and Meta as evidence that the AI companies are well aware that what they’re doing is illegal, the implication being that there’s no need to wait on the courts.

“If the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world worth trillions of dollars can come take an individual author’s work like Mr. Baldacci, lie about it, hide it, profit off of it, and there’s nothing our law does about that, we need to change the law,” said Hawley.