Senators Introduce Bill to Require Disclosure of AI

“While AI has the potential to improve our lives and change the way we work and innovate, we need a unified approach to implementing guardrails that protect the work and livelihoods of all workers, including artists and creators,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), one of the two sponsors of the measure, said in a statement. “I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan legislation with Senator Curtis, which takes an important step toward ensuring transparency in the development of AI models and making sure creators are fairly compensated for their work.”

Added co-sponsor Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), “Congress must help encourage AI innovation, but not without transparency and accountability. The CLEAR Act strikes the right balance by protecting creators’ intellectual property while providing clear expectations for companies. By shedding light on how generative AI models are trained, our bipartisan legislation will help build public trust for emerging technologies and foster the best of American creativity.”

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The bill is not Schiff’s first foray into AI data transparency. While still in the House in 2024, he introduced the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, covering much of the same ground. Like that earlier bill, the new legislation would impose civil financial penalties for failing to disclose the works used.

Related: NY Bill Would Require Disclosure of AI-Generated Material in News Stories

Data transparency has been a key demand of creators and copyright industries since the earliest days of the generative AI boom but has been resisted by AI developers out of concerns over the cost and complexity of identifying tens of millions of works in training datasets and fear of attracting litigation from rights holders.

A measure of transparency was included in the European Union’s AI Act but a disclosure requirement has never garnered sufficient support in the U.S. Congress to become law.  California’s Training Data Transparency Act requires developers to provide summaries of datasets used in training, but the summaries released to date have been short on details.

The CLEAR Act also stops short of requiring licensing of copyrighted works used in training, another key creator demand and the subject of multiple ongoing lawsuits against developers by authors and rights holders.

Nonetheless, the bill was quickly endorsed by an array of creative industry organizations, including the Authors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, the National Music Publishers Association, the Recording Industry Association of America and SAG-AFTRA. Notably missing from the list, however, is the Motion Picture Association (MPA) representing the major Hollywood studios, which has had to navigate some disagreement among its members over how aggressively to push for legislative measures.

Also not on the list is the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents film and TV production companies and is currently preparing for a new round of labor talks with the actors and writers guilds in which AI use is expected to play a major role in the negotiations. The industry suffered a months-long production shutdown in 2023 after the last round of contract negotiations broke down in large part over the role of AI. Publicly endorsing guild-backed AI legislation now could undercut the producers’ leverage in the coming negotiations.