Trump Cans Copyright Chief After She Warns AI May Not Be ‘Fair Use’

President Donald Trump fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday, just a day after her office said AI developers could be infringing copyright by vacuuming up protected works to train their models.

Perlmutter’s ouster, first reported by Politico, cements a broader leadership churn at the Library of Congress that began with the removal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on Thursday, the official who appointed Perlmutter in 2020. Together the firings wrest day-to-day control of U.S. copyright policy from an agency long insulated from White House politics and pulls it closer into the president’s orbit.

“Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” the report, released Friday, reads.

The report — Part III of the Copyright Office’s artificial intelligence study — rejects industry arguments that ingesting entire libraries is no different from the way humans learn and calls out the “superhuman speed and scale” of generative systems that replicate works “beyond established fair use boundaries.” It concludes AI firms making commercial use of vast copyrighted corpora without permission risk liability at every stage — data scraping, training and output generation — and urges Congress to explore licensing regimes if voluntary deals stall.

By allowing that language to stand, Perlmutter broke from tech allies like Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley figures who see broad fair use protections as essential for developing cutting-edge models. Last month, Musk replied “I agree” to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law.”