White House fires Copyright Office leaders as controversial AI report surfaces

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, less than a day after the office rushed out a sure-to-be-controversial report on artificial intelligence.

The report found that AI companies training their models on copyrighted materials may not be protected by the fair use legal doctrine. The report’s findings are advisory, but they could be influential in upcoming court cases on the subject. Not only that, but on Thursday, May 8, President Trump fired the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, who oversaw the U.S. Copyright Office. In firing Dr. Hayden, The White House cited the Library’s DEI initiatives.

However, the timing of the firings and the unusual circumstances surrounding the publication of the AI report has alarmed some copyright lawyers. Cornell H. Winston, the President of the American Association of Law Libraries, issued a statement to AALL members on Monday saying he was “deeply concerned” by the firings of Perlmutter and Dr. Hayden, though this letter did not mention the AI report specifically.

President Trump has pledged to take a business-friendly approach to artificial intelligence, and he issued two executive orders in April to promote the United States’ leadership in the AI industry.

The Copyright Office’s report is bad news for the AI industry

The U.S. Copyright Office has been working on a consequential three-part report about copyright law and artificial intelligence, with big implications for AI companies. At present, many legal aspects of artificial intelligence and copyright law are unsettled, with high-stakes court cases involving OpenAI and Meta currently working their way through the courts. 

The third and final report, “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training,” dealt with precisely the type of fair use arguments at stake in some of these cases. Specifically, the report examines whether training AI models on copyrighted material such as books, movies, news articles, and images is a violation of copyright law, or whether it’s protected under the fair use doctrine. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in April against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Rather than waiting to release a final version of the report and promoting its release, the office instead quietly released a “pre-publication version” of the report on Friday.

The preliminary version casts doubt on the viability of the fair use defense, potentially hobbling companies like Meta and OpenAI in the courtroom. Part 3 of the report also says that artists may suffer financial harm from AI-generated material that mimics the style of their work, as well as lost licensing opportunities if AI companies can train their models on copyrighted works without compensating the creators.

A concerning sequence of events

On Thursday, the Librarian of Congress was fired; on Friday, the U.S. Copyright Office released a pre-publication Part 3 of its report; and on Saturday, the leader of the Copyright Office gets sacked.

When the report was unexpectedly published late Friday, copyright lawyer and Associate Professor of Law Blake E. Reid with the University of Colorado Law School posited on Bluesky if a purge of copyright staff might be imminent.

Reid wrote, “the ‘Pre-Publication’ status is very strange and conspicuously timed relative to the firing of the Librarian of Congress. I continue to wonder (speculatively!) if a purge at the Copyright Office is incoming and they felt the need to rush this out.”

Hours later, the White House fired Perlmutter.

In a statement provided to Mashable, a spokesperson with the U.S. Copyright Office provided only this brief comment: “On Saturday afternoon, May 10, 2025, the White House sent an email to Shira Perlmutter saying your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately.’”

The office provided “no further comment at this time” to our questions about the timing of the report’s release. We reached out to the White House for comment on the report’s release and Perlmutter and Dr. Hayden’s firings, and we’ll update this article if we receive a reply.

Reid described the artificial intelligence report as a “straight-ticket loss for the AI companies” on Bluesky. And in a phone interview with Mashable, Reid said it was strange the report was published so soon after the high-profile firing of the Librarian of Congress.

“It’s hard for me to come up with a sequence of events there that doesn’t involve the administration trying to do something about AI,” Reid said. “I still don’t think we know what that something is…but I just saw that as being the Occam’s Razor explanation, especially with the register being fired the next day.”

“The AI companies were hoping for the Office to kind of come around and throw them some lifelines in the litigation they could use to support their position,” Reid said. Instead, the report concluded, “there are definitely some things that are beyond the bounds of what we’ve recognized as fair use. You know, the sort of language and sort of specific theories they used to back it up did not strike me as helpful, and are probably pretty unhelpful, to the AI companies if the report were to get picked up by a court.”

Though some copyright lawyers are concerned, suspicious timing doesn’t necessarily prove the events are directly related. The pre-publication version of Part 3 of the report is available to read online at the U.S. Copyright Office website.