Chairman Hawley Exposes Big Tech’s Complicity in Piracy to Train AI Models & Willfulness to Bankrupt U.S. Creative Community

For information about Senator Hawley’s new RECA law to compensate Missourians,click here.
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)chaireda Judiciary subcommittee hearingrevealingBig Tech’s role behind the unchecked piracy of copyrighted content to fuel companies’ artificial intelligence (AI) models. The hearing featured witness testimony from bestselling author David Baldacci as well as AI experts and law professors who lent credence to Senator Hawley’s claim: AI companies, namely Meta, have crossed the line of technological innovation into corporate crime.“Today’s hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history. . . . AI companies are training their models on stolen material, period. . . . And we’re not talking about these companies simply scouring the internet for what’s publicly available. We’re talking about piracy,”Senator Hawleysaid.
“Are we going to protect [Americans’ creative community], or are we going to allow a few mega-corporations to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions of dollars in profits—maybe trillions—and pay nobody for it. That’s not America,”the Senator argued, explaining that the issue at hand is a moral one as much as a legal one.
Baldacci went on to point out the harm mass piracy poses to America’s authors, songwriters, and other creative producers, whose works are now in the crosshairs of Big Tech’s lawlessness.
“Every single one of my books was presented to me . . . in three seconds. It really felt like I had been robbed of everything of my entire adult life that I had worked on,”Baldaccisaid.
Key revelations uncovered during the hearing include:
Watch the full subcommittee hearinghere.

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