The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently submitted comments to the US Copyright Office as part of the Office’s notice of inquiry examining copyright issues related to artificial intelligence.
The agency’s comments largely focused on two areas: potential threats to competition from AI, and copyright.
Competition: The FTC cautioned that “the rapid development and deployment of AI also poses potential risks to competition” for several reasons:
- “The rising importance of AI to the economy may further lock in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms. These powerful, vertically integrated incumbents control many of the inputs necessary for the effective development and deployment of AI tools, including cloud-based or local computing power and access to large stores of training data. These dominant technology companies may have the incentive to use their control over these inputs to unlawfully entrench their market positions in AI and related markets, including digital content markets.”
- “AI tools can be used to facilitate collusive behavior that unfairly inflates prices, precisely target price discrimination, or otherwise manipulate outputs.”
- “Many large technology firms possess vast financial resources that enable them to indemnify the users of their generative AI tools or obtain exclusive licenses to copyrighted (or otherwise proprietary) training data, potentially further entrenching the market power of these dominant firms.”