USA Copyright Office Rules AI Output is Public Domain, Not Intellectual Property

Plus, DeekSeek's distillation drama, Google's Titan Architecture, the Vatican's Antiqua e Nova, OpenAI Tests Out Manipulating Reddit Users, and Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 Max.

Well welcome back to this week’s most important AI news in one place. I feel like I’m about to pass out from the sheer amount of AI news happening right now. We just had six months of AI news moving at a snail’s pace, and now—it’s like the apocalypse.

#1 The U.S. Copyright Office’s Latest Report: AI Only Works Are Not Copyrightable

For over a year, the U.S. Copyright Office has been investigating a crucial question: are AI-generated outputs eligible for copyright protection? After reviewing 10,000+ public comments, legal arguments, and international approaches, they’ve come to a clear conclusion: purely AI-generated content is not copyrightable. If no human creativity is involved in generating the work, it belongs to no one.

Here’s the key things this 52 page report establishes:

• AI-Generated Works = Public Domain – If a model like Midjourney, ChatGPT, or Music LLMs creates a work entirely on its own, that work is not eligible for copyright. No exceptions.

• Prompts Don’t Make You an Author – Entering a detailed prompt, even one with extensive descriptions, is not enough to claim copyright. The AI still decides the expressive elements, making it not a product of human authorship.

• Human Editing & Arrangement Matter – If a person modifies, arranges, or meaningfully transforms an AI-generated work, their contributions may be copyrightable—but the AI-generated parts remain unprotected.

• Compilations Can Be Protected – If AI-generated content is combined with human-created material (such as a comic book with AI-generated images and human-written dialogue), the overall arrangement can be copyrighted—but again, the AI elements remain unprotected.

The Copyright Office also rejects the idea of a new copyright category for AI-generated content, saying there’s no need for new laws at this time. Instead, they argue that existing copyright law already provides clear answers about AI-assisted works. However, they acknowledge that AI is changing all the time and promise to keep monitoring the situation.

I know the big question youre asking... What about AI models training on copyrighted material? That’s still an open question. The Copyright Office says a future report will address the legality of AI models training on copyrighted works without permission, covering licensing issues and potential liability for AI companies.

My Initial Thoughts: You know I’m a huge copyright and data privacy nerd. Back in the day, I worked in copyright licensing for Sony in the music industry, and I was so embedded that I even attended the Grammys (different lifetime, but still cool).

So while I’m not exactly surprised by the Copyright Office’s answer here, I do think it’s super refreshing. Instead of handing more power to AI companies, they’ve gone with a democratized approach that AI-generated content belongs to no one.

This decision also draws a very clear line in the sand that AI can’t replace human creativity in the eyes of the law (at least not yet), so it’s a win for individual creators who feared AI-generated works would run them out of the business.

However, let’s be real, the bigger battle is still ahead. The next fight is AI training data. Who owns it, who gets paid, who is allowed to use it, and whether AI companies can continue using copyrighted material without authorization. I don’t think the copyright office will be able to dance around this much longer, so I expect it’ll be the next report we receive.

#2: What the Heck is Going On with DeepSeek?

Man, there’s a lot to unpack here since we last chatted. I think there are really two major updates. 1. People are saying that it was a lie it only cost them 5.67 and two there’s a huge claim that China and DeepSeek distilled their model from openAi.

There are two major updates surrounding DeepSeek. First, the widely reported $5.67M training cost for DeepSeek-V3 appears to be misleading. This figure is based on a theoretical rental price of $2/hour for H800 GPUs, but in reality, DeepSeek had already stockpiled between 10,000 and 50,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before U.S. export bans. When factoring in hardware, energy, and infrastructure, the true investment is likely in the hundreds of millions. Their lower costs come from algorithmic optimizations, particularly how they distribute computing power more efficiently. This fits into a larger industry shift—where once AI training costs were assumed to be in the hundreds of millions, recent estimates suggest even models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet were trained in the $10M–$30M range.

The second, and potentially bigger, controversy is OpenAI’s claim that DeepSeek illegally distilled its model from OpenAI’s own technology. Knowledge distillation is a method where a larger “teacher” AI trains a smaller “student” AI to mimic its outputs, allowing for a leaner, faster model while retaining intelligence. OpenAI alleges that DeepSeek extracted knowledge from its models in violation of its terms, essentially using GPT-based outputs as training data. There’s even anecdotal evidence that DeepSeek, when asked “What model are you?”, responded with “O1”, potentially referencing OpenAI’s models. OpenAI is claiming this is a huge violation of its intellectual property and terms and conditions.

My Initial Thoughts: I’m going to focus primarily on the distillation argument and whether or not DeepSeek stole from OpenAI. Some people are saying, “DeepSeek didn’t copy OpenAI.” I’m not sure I fully agree, because if they used an OpenAI model to train R1, that’s at the very least an extremely gray area. But I hate getting into subjective debate, and rather put to bed something more concrete.

Even if DeepSeek did distill knowledge from OpenAI, and even if that could be considered "copying" in some sense, the U.S. Copyright Office just ruled that AI-generated outputs are not copyrightable. That means OpenAI does not own the responses its models generate. And if OpenAI doesn’t own them, then DeepSeek may not have actually violated OpenAI’s IP or any law, because what OpenAI produces is, by legal definition, not protected as intellectual property.

Now, you can bet OpenAI is going to be furious about that. But let’s not forget, OpenAI trained its models on unauthorized copyrighted material too and also operating in a legal gray area. So whether or not DeepSeek “Stole” from OpenAI, there’s no honor among thieves.

It’s thieves stealing from thieves at this point.

#3. Google’s New Titan Architecture: The Possible NextGen of LLMs

Transformers is an element of foundation model architecture that has powering models like GPT-4 and DeepSeek. But they struggle with long-term context. Once a sequence exceeds their context window, they tend to simply forget.

So this limitation has made them inefficient for tasks that require extended memory, such as NLP, scientific research, and even real-time reasoning. But Google’s launched a new Titans architecture that addresses this problem for the first time by introducing a structured memory system, designed after humans, allowing AI to retain and retrieve information across millions of tokens without burning through GPUs.

Titans integrate three memory components into its ai infrastructure:

1. short-term memory, which processes immediate context

2. long-term memory, which stores and recalls historical data dynamically; and

3. persistent memory, a stable knowledge base that remains fixed during inference.

Unlike traditional Transformers that tend to treat each new prompt as an isolated event, Titans learn, adapt, and optimize memory use over time, and architecture that is build with long-term memory in mind may become the next gen of machine intelligence.

I will release a separate video talking about this Titan architecture in more detail for those that really want to understand it. For the rest of us, this is probably all you need to know.

My Initial Thoughts: There have been multiple AI architectures designed to emulate aspects of the human brain, with neural networks being the most fundamental example. More recently, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have attempted to improve efficiency by dynamically selecting specialized subnetworks, but none have explicitly mirrored human memory systems the way Titans does. Titan’s approach of dividing memory into short-term, long-term, and persistent components is an entirely new way of addressing AI’s context retention problem, making it a particularly interesting to me. I’ve never seen anything approached this way, so we’ll see how its adopted but this is a bigger change for sure. Since the goal is always to achieve AGI, continuing to build systems that think more and more like humans will always be key.

#4. Vatican Releases Advisement on AI

The Vatican has released “Antiqua et Nova,” a new document outlining ethical principles for AI.

These are the top 5 takeaways from their document

1. AI should never have the authority to kill. Autonomous systems in warfare, medicine, or policing must always have human oversight when life is at stake.

2. Do Not Search for Human Connection in AI Systems: They warns against AI girlfriends, emotional connections or seeking deep relationships with machines, so no more asking ChatGPT for advice about your boyfriend

3. Data privacy is a Fundamental Human Right that is currently being violated

4. Environmental Impact of AI

5. But the biggest? AI must not replace human thought. Their biggest concern is that some could become so reliant on these systems that we lose our agency, our own thoughts, and our ability to think critically.

My Initial Thoughts: I dont have a lot of thoughts on this, I just want to tell you the hilarious way I found out about this AI news. A family friend from Buenos Aires, who is a Catholic priest and follows my Almanac, asked me if I heard about the Vatican’s recent statement on AI. Never in a million years would i have thought to look for AI news from the Vatican, but here we are.

Speed round:

1. OpenAI Used a Subreddit to Test Manipulating You. OpenAI used a subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to test what they call “human persuasion” *cough manipulation* using its AI models. Thats not terrifying.

2. AI Systems with unacceptable risk are now banned in the EU, such as AI used for social scoring, life or death decisions, or AI that manipulates a person’s decision. Wow those two updates really go hand in hand don’t they.

3. OpenAI says it plans to allow the US government to use its AI models for nuclear weapons, security and other scientific projects.

4. Alibaba Launches New Model: Qwen 2.5Max. Alibaba released a new model Qwen 2.5-Max, and according to them, it’s now the best AI model on the market, allegedly outperforming GPT-4o, DeepSeek V3, and even Meta’s Llama 3.1-405B in key benchmarks. So Alibaba has had their own models for a while, and their own AI assistant can search the web, upload files, generate images, and soon… even create videos, so pretty much everything models like OpenAI can do. But is it actually that good? Some early YouTube reviews have run some preliminary tests and show it solving complex logic puzzles that OpenAI and DeepSeek failed to solve, so I will link it here.

5. OpenAI Launched AI Agent for Deep Research. OpenAI Launched AI Agent for Deep Research, a new AI tool designed to autonomously browse the web, analyze data, and generate detailed research reports in minutes. While powerful, it struggles with accuracy and source verification, meaning users still need human oversight. It’s currently available to ChatGPT Pro users in the U.S.