As first reported by Politico, the Trump administration has fired the Register of Copyrights and US Copyright Office Director, Shira Perlmutter. The Register of Copyrights works under the Librarian of Congress — a title held most recently by Carla Hayden, who was fired earlier this week for her DEI efforts, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The New York Times. Perlmutter’s dismissal comes just after the office released a report that raised concerns about certain uses of copyrighted material to train generative AI. It’s the third in a series of papers published over the last year analyzing copyright law as it pertains to AI.
The Trump administration — particularly DOGE — has been pushing for broader use of AI. In April, the White House called on federal agencies to develop AI strategies and name Chief AI Officers that will “serve as change agents and AI advocates.”
In a statement released after news of Perlmutter’s firing came to light, Congressman Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, called the move “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” saying, “It is surely no coincidence [Donald Trump] acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
