California’s Proposed AB 412 Demands the Impossible and Ignores Existing Solutions

The problem:

AB 412, the AI Copyright Transparency Act, incorrectly assumes developers can reliably determine which copyrighted works appear in training datasets and who owns them. But that assumption does not reflect how copyright ownership or AI training works:

• There is no comprehensive machine-readable database of copyrighted works and ownership information.
• Copyright ownership can span multiple authors for the same work and frequently change as a result of licensing practices.
• A single piece of content can contain multiple copyrighted elements with different rightsholders. 
• AI models are trained on enormous datasets gathered from across the internet that are cleaned and processed before any computational analysis takes place..

Complicating matters:

AB 412 requires developers to identify exact or substantially similar versions of copyrighted works across enormous training datasets and records. That may sound straightforward, but in practice it isn't. The tools needed to perform that kind of matching at scale are either unreliable or nonexistent. And because copyright registrations and ownership records are frequently incomplete or unavailable, even when a potential match is identified, it may be impossible to verify.

Why it matters:

The consequences of AB 412 would extend well beyond compliance requirements. The bill would impose substantial costs on California’s burgeoning developer ecosystem and create barriers for startups and smaller companies that lack the resources to navigate complex reporting requirements, imposing a heavy burden on open source development. New statutory damages for noncompliance compound that risk, penalizing developers for inadvertent errors in an effectively impossible matching exercise.

The bigger picture: 

• The legislation could also undermine American AI competitiveness. California is home to 35 of the world’s top 50 AI companies and leads the world in generative AI research and development. The state’s technology sector contributes at least $2.6 billion annually in state revenue and more than $14.3 billion over a five-year period.
• Imposing burdensome new requirements on AI developers would make it harder for U.S. firms to build advanced AI systems that can solve societal challenges, drive scientific discovery, and create new opportunities for growth and innovation across industries – while putting one of California’s most important economic engines at risk.

Dive deeper:

New tools are making AB 412 increasingly unnecessary. Creators and publishers today can already take meaningful steps to control how their content is accessed online. Those tools include:

• AI crawler blocking tools.
• Paywalls and gated archives.
• Rate-limiting and bot-detection systems.
• Tools that alter or watermark content to discourage unauthorized AI training and help establish provenance. 

These tools allow creators to block, monitor, and manage access to their content without imposing sweeping new mandates on AI developers.

Reality check:

Courts are still working through several foundational copyright questions related to AI, including whether copyright owners have the right to absolute control over their works, allowing them to block their use in training AI models. More than 100 federal cases are currently examining these issues, and to date, two federal judges have ruled that they do not.

Zoom out:

Copyright is governed at the federal level for a reason. Creativity and innovation benefit from a single set of nationwide rules. By layering state-specific obligations onto an area already being litigated in federal courts, AB 412 risks creating legal uncertainty for developers. It could also trigger challenges over whether the law conflicts with federal copyright protections, drawing California into costly and prolonged litigation.

The bottom line:

AB 412 would impose an unworkable compliance regime on AI developers of all sizes while offering little that creators cannot already achieve through existing voluntary technologies. California should reject mandates that demand the impossible and instead support voluntary solutions that empower creators while preserving American leadership in AI innovation.