The Biggest IP Theft in U.S. History: Senator Josh Hawley Slams Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI for Pirating Creators’ Work

On July 16, Senator Josh Hawley opened a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing with a moment that cut through the noise. “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.”

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Testimony confirmed the scale. Attorney Maxwell Pritt of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP informed the committee that companies, including Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, trained their AI models on more than 200 terabytes of copyrighted material.

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Internal documents presented by Pritt showed Meta staff acknowledging the theft: “It’s the piracy, and us knowing, and being accomplices, that’s the issue.” Some engineers reportedly used non-Meta servers to conceal the activity. Senator Hawley described this not only as a legal violation but a profound moral failure to protect American creators. He warned, “Are we going to allow a few mega‑corporations to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions in profits, maybe trillions, and pay nobody for it?”

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Facing mounting scrutiny, AI companies have invoked the fair use doctrine, which allows for the limited use of copyrighted material for commentary, education, or transformative purposes. But critics argue that large-scale commercial scraping is neither limited nor transformative. Courts remain divided, with some rulings upholding AI training as fair use and others allowing damages for piracy of source content.​

 

In June, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group sued AI startups Suno and Udio, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted recordings in their AI models and that their outputs mimic protected works. The Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) described it as a new example of Silicon Valley exploiting creative output.

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However, the lawsuits primarily cover major-label catalogs and do not require AI companies to disclose their training sources, leaving independent artists without recourse.

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Congress has proposed the No FAKES Act, short for Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe, to criminalize unauthorized voice and likeness replication and to establish a federal right of publicity. But the act does not cover the songs, lyrics, melodies, chords, or production elements used to train AI models, leaving much of the creators’ work unprotected.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​