Hundreds of entertainers sign open letter calling for AI copyright protection

Paul McCartney, Guillermo del Toro, Cate Blanchett, Lilly Wachowski, Aubrey Plaza, Damon Lindelof, and many other recognizable names are among the signatories.

By Emma Keates  |  March 18, 2025 | 10:11am
Photos: Jim Dyson/Getty Images; Aaron Poole/©A.M.P.A.S.; Blaine Ohigashi/©A.M.P.A.S.
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Hundreds of entertainers sign open letter calling for AI copyright protection
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Less than two years after going on strike partly over the encroachment of AI in the entertainment industry, hundreds of actors, writers, directors, musicians, and other creative professionals have signed an open letter urging the White House to push back on AI companies trying to gobble up their copyrighted work. “We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the letter reads in part, per Deadline. The document goes on to claim that the entertainment industry supports “2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually,” but “AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”

The letter’s 400-plus signatories include hundreds of household names, such as Paul McCartney, Guillermo del Toro, Ava DuVernay, Cate Blanchett, Alfonso Cuaron, Aubrey Plaza, Lilly Wachowski, Ben Stiller, Damon Lindelof, Lily Gladstone, Bette Midler, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ayo Edebiri, Taika Waititi, Cynthia Erivo, Mark Ruffalo, Natasha Lyonne, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Adam Scott, Paul Simon, and more. The correspondence, addressed to the White House Office of Science and Technology, began circulating this weekend.

While AI has been a nascent threat to the industry for years now, this letter was written specifically to address the Trump administration’s calls for an “AI Action Plan,” a coming tech strategy to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” as the President signed in one of his many executive orders. In response, Google and OpenAI lobbied to remove guardrails from the industry, including establishing workarounds to use hundreds of copyrighted materials to train their large language models. The signatories, however, argue that the companies are asking for a “special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries.” The letter continues: “There is no reason to weaken or eliminate the copyright protections that have helped America flourish. Not when AI companies can use our copyrighted material by simply doing what the law requires: negotiating appropriate licenses with copyright holders—just as every other industry does.”

This is hardly the first group to push back against the AI industry’s use of copyrighted material, and it won’t be the last. The past few months have also seen lawsuits and other legal action from the WGA, multiple unions in France’s publishing industry, major Indian media companies, and individuals like Sarah Silverman, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham. 

You can read the letter in full and check out the complete list of signatories at Deadline.

 
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