On May 20 and 21, Authors Guild legal staff and board members went to Washington, D.C., to remind members of Congress of the importance of free speech and make the case that artificial intelligence must not be built on the unconsented, uncompensated work of writers. 

The delegation included bestselling author and Guild member David Baldacci, a plaintiff in the Authors Guild’s class action against OpenAI; Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger; Director of Advocacy and Policy Umair Kazi; Chief Legal Officer Kevin Amer; Authors Guild President and author Ralph Eubanks; and Authors Guild Foundation Board and Guild Council Members Laura Pedersen, Adriana Trigiani, and Charles Graeber, one of the three named plaintiffs in the author class-action lawsuit against Anthropic that resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, the largest copyright settlement in history. 

“The work of creators is their own, and the fact that AI wasn’t imagined when copyright laws were written doesn’t change that,” said Graeber. “Both sides of the aisle seemed to appreciate that we have a short window of time in which we can make laws for the country we want and protect property, including intellectual property, from the commercial interests of big tech.” 

A Bipartisan Sweep of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees 

Over two days, the delegation completed twelve meetings across both chambers of Congress, engaging an equal number of senators and representatives from eleven states (CA, DE, GA, HI, MD, MO, NC, OR, SC, TN, WI) as well as key legislative staff. The reach was genuinely bipartisan: eight Democrats and four Republicans, spanning the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, with direct engagement with members of the Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee, the committee with the most direct jurisdiction over copyright and AI legislation. 

The meetings included Sens. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Reps. Hank Johnson (D-GA), Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR). 

Legislative Asks: Consent, Disclosure, and Accountability 

The Guild urged members of Congress to support legislation that would help rightsholders shutter rogue foreign piracy sites and require AI developers to obtain consent before training on copyrighted works, disclose what they have already used, label outputs with permanent identifiers indicating that they are AI generated, and be held accountable for the harms their systems cause. In addition, the team urged members of Congress to block the federal book banning bill, HR 7661, the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. 

Before turning to specific pieces of legislation, the authors in the delegation spoke eloquently about the harm caused to them and the writing profession generally by AI companies’ theft of their books and use for developing their AI models—which owe their ability to write well directly to the books they ingested—and described the massive number of AI generated books already flooding the market that try to directly steal sales from authors’ books.    

The delegation expressed support for several bills:  

• The Block BEARD Act and its House counterpart, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act, bipartisan site-blocking measures to stop foreign piracy operations that have devastated author income and that, it has since emerged, supplied much of the training data for the major AI models; 

• The CLEAR Act, which would require AI developers to file public notice of the copyrighted works used to train their systems; and the TRAIN Act, which would create a judicial process for copyright owners to determine if their works were used for training; 

• The AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which would give authors a private right of action to sue AI developers who ingested their work without consent; 

• The Protecting Consumers from Deceptive AI Act, which would establish a federal framework for labeling AI-generated content; 

• Rep. Foushee’s newly introduced legislation requiring text-based disclosure standards for AI-generated content, an area the Guild has identified as critical for readers and authors alike; and 

• Sen. Blackburn’s AI framework, which would establish that unauthorized AI training on copyrighted works does not qualify as fair use, a foundational principle the Guild has long championed. 

Several of the offices, including those of Sen. Schiff, Rep. Foushee, and Rep. Johnson, committed to follow up on specific legislative language, including discussion of a House counterpart to the CLEAR Act and Rep. Johnson’s developing legislation on presumed liability for AI copyright infringement. 

“The written word in books and entertainment is one of America’s most profitable enterprises, and a top export for the United States. Authors must lock arms with our government to safeguard and enforce copyright laws, which have made the United States the leader around the world in defense of free speech and the written word created from the minds and souls of human writers. We believe AI, a new tech industry, must honor copyright law and defend the rights of the creator to own his or her own work without fear of theft. We seek legislation to label AI fakes based upon our work sold and to cease theft of our intellectual property to train machines, and worse, copy our work with disregard for its creator’s rights and sole ownership. We found enthusiastic bipartisan support on behalf of authors.” —Adriana Trigiani 

Part of a Larger Fight 

This lobbying effort is part of the Authors Guild’s broader and ongoing advocacy around AI and copyright. The Guild has filed suit against OpenAI on behalf of a class of authors whose books were used to train its models without permission. The Guild also helped advise the lawyers and assisted writers in filing claims for the Anthropic settlement and introduced the world’s first Human Authored certification program. 

“We lobby to remind folk of what they already know, which is that exploits such as copyright infringement and book banning are not only unjust but major impediments to the dissemination of knowledge and the art of storytelling. And this is what gives us our shared humanity—our capacity to understand and empathize with those who may be very different.” —Laura Pedersen 

The Guild will continue pushing for legislation that protects authors’ rights, compensates creators fairly, and ensures that the AI revolution does not come at the expense of the people whose writing made it possible. 

“There are so many misconceptions about what writers do, as well as what writers make. I believe our presence in congressional offices during our recent lobbying trip gave those we visited not only a sense of what writers do but also put a human face on how technology, particularly AI, is affecting the lives and livelihoods of writers.” —W. Ralph Eubanks