Did Elon Musk try, and fail, to take over the Library of Congress so he could feed the nation's intellectual property into training fuel for his AI company?
That's what some U.S. Congress members — and even some fierce supporters of President Donald Trump — are saying.
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Over the weekend, President Donald Trump fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter. The timing of the firing was notable as the office had just released a report on AI, and under some unusual circumstances. The Copyright Office's report concluded that training AI models on copyrighted material may not be protected by the fair use legal doctrine — a major blow to AI companies.
Big Tech companies and their executives have gone out of their way to curry favor with Trump since the 2024 election, and none more so than Elon Musk, who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help elect President Trump and other Republicans.
So, when Trump fired the heads of the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office, some copyright lawyers grew concerned. The fear: That Elon Musk was committing an end-run around copyright law and getting the motherlode of AI training material directly from the source.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis," said Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25) in a statement. "It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."
It seems, however, that this concern was well-founded.
According to a new report from The Verge, the Big Tech critics within Trump's own circles are "convinced" that Musk and White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks were behind the firings. Specifically, they believed Musk and Sacks were attempting a copyright takeover for Big Tech.
“We're not going to let every copyright work in America, every creator's hard-earned work get stolen by the tech bros so they can make billions of dollars off of other people's work," said Mike Davis, founder of the Internet Accountability Project and an antitrust advisor to Trump, in a recent interview with right-wing podcast host Steve Bannon.
So, when Trump officials showed up at the Copyright Office this week with a letter from the president, critics feared Musk had sent members of his special project DOGE to take over. However, The Verge reports the men are actually anti-Big Tech officials from within Trump's orbit.
The White House has reportedly named Paul Perkins as the acting Register of Copyrights and Brian Nieves as the acting deputy librarian, although it's not clear if he has the authority to make these appointments. (The Librarian of Congress is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.) Todd Blanche is now working as their boss in the role of Acting Librarian of Congress after President Trump fired his predecessor, Dr. Carla Hayden, last week. All three men are staunch Big Tech critics. In fact, one source told The Verge that Blanche is there specifically to "stick it to tech.”
