Can intellectual property survive as AI advances and allegedly uses copyrighted work as training material?
Twitter (now X) co-founder Jack Dorsey recently weighed in on the debate, taking to X on Friday to call for an end to intellectual property law, which covers areas like copyright, patents, and trademarks — and Elon Musk approved of his stance.
“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on Friday evening in a post that has been viewed more than 10 million times. An hour later, Musk responded, “I agree.”
I agree
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025
Dorsey immediately received pushback from lawyer and former 2024 vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan.
Shanahan, who was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin until 2023, told Dorsey that IP law was the “only” barrier between work created by human beings and work by AI.
“IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations,” Shanahan wrote in a reply to Dorsey’s post. “If you want to reform it, let’s talk!”
Dorsey objected, replying that “creativity” is what separates humans from AI and that the legal system is currently inhibiting creativity.
Jack Dorsey. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images
While Dorsey may want to end intellectual property law, copyright holders are still holding on to their work. Dozens of cases have been filed over the past few years in U.S. federal court against AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as authors, artists, and news organizations accuse these companies of using their copyrighted work to train AI models without credit or compensation.
AI needs ample training material to keep it sharp. It took about 300 billion words to train ChatGPT, an AI chatbot now used by over 500 million people weekly. AI image generator DALL·E 2 needed “hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet” to become operational.
The first U.S. ruling on AI copyright law arrived in February when a Delaware federal court ruled that legal research firm Ross Intelligence was not allowed to copy content from Thomson Reuters.
Ross Intelligence asserted it was allowed to utilize copyrighted material to train its AI under the fair use doctrine, which permits the use of a copyrighted work in specific circumstances. However, the court dismissed the fair use defense because the AI training data was employed in a commercial context.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman commented on fair use in AI copyright law at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June. Suleyman stated then that almost all web content was fair use for “anyone” to copy or recreate, with the possible exception of some news sites and publishers that have asked not to be scraped.
“That’s the gray area, and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts,” Suleyman said, at the time.
Related: A Microsoft-Partnered AI Startup Is Being Sued By the Biggest Record Labels in the World
