All is fair in love and war, but Big Tech fears fair use, at least as currently constituted.

Back in February, the White House put out a call for public comment on its forthcoming “AI Action Plan,” which seeks to finally lay out broad-based rules for how the industry should operate. The deadline for comment passed on March 13, and last week, major industry players began publishing their comments online — with major figures embarking on a public lobbying tour of sorts. Central to the AI industry’s hopes: settling the “fair use” question over employing copyrighted material to train AI models in their favor, once and for all.

Copy Cats

We’re now several years into the great AI revolution, and it remains an unsettled question whether firms are committing mass copyright infringement by injecting boatloads of unlicensed content into their AI training models. A handful of lawsuits that could provide some legal clarity — such as the New York Times’ case against OpenAI and Microsoft — are still trudging through the system, and the cases that have been settled are relatively narrow in scope.

Thus far, the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley is, perhaps predictably, winning in internal debates inside big tech firms; recently unsealed court filings in a lawsuit by a group of authors against Meta, for instance, revealed that the Facebook parent dodged the licensing quandary entirely by simply torrenting millions of books off of the piracy platform Library Genesis, or LibGen.

Before the legal system settles fair use one way or the other, Big Tech is hoping the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan can provide clarity. As it argues its case, the industry has settled on familiar reasoning: If the US settles the fair use question in favor of publishers and content copyright holders, it would risk buoying Chinese competitors who largely are unburdened by IP concerns. So just how big of an advantage do Chinese AI firms, such as DeepSeek, really have?

• “American companies still maintain the lead in algorithmic innovation and computing resources, especially given recent export controls,” Dev Nag, CEO of AI-powered automated response platform QueryPal, told The Daily Upside. “But [China’s relatively lax copyright restrictions] create a compounding advantage for nations which don’t force their companies to operate in perpetual legal limbo.”
• Still, there is a third way that’s been explored elsewhere around the world; both Hong Kong and the European Union have found a middle ground, ruling copyrighted material fair use for AI training, but allowing copyright holders to “opt out” if they don’t want their material used for said training.

Howdy, Partner: In its action plan proposal to the US government, OpenAI didn’t just call for certitude in the fair use debate — it proposed forming a voluntary partnership with the Department of Commerce under a framework similar to the one the DoC has with utility companies. That could exempt the company not just from copyright litigation, but also from certain state-level laws, such as those intended to “protect consumers against harm from [AI-driven] ‘consequential decision making’” in processes such as “bank loan approvals or access to legal services,” Yelena Ambartsumian, founder and attorney at Ambart Law, told The Daily Upside.

Consulting groups that do big business with federal agencies are having a DOGE moment.

Accenture said during its earnings call last week that Department of Government Efficiency-led federal spending cuts were starting to hit sales. The company’s fiscal second-quarter report was otherwise positive, but its stock slid after the announcement, extending the decline since Inauguration Day to 15%.

Terminated for Convenience

“As you know, the new administration has a clear goal to run the federal government more efficiently. During this process, many new procurement actions have slowed, which is negatively impacting our sales and revenue,” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said during the company’s earnings call. Accenture Federal Services accounted for 8% of the company’s global revenue in fiscal 2024.

Consultants like Accenture are scrambling to justify their work as a rash of executive orders and directives jeopardize new and existing contracts with the government. The General Services Administration (GSA), which assists other government agencies with procurement, asked federal agencies to review their contracts with the 10 highest-paid consulting firms (which include Accenture) and terminate the ones that aren’t “mission critical” in a February memo, first reported by NextGov/FCW. Stephen Ehikian, acting head of the GSA, wrote that those companies are set to receive over $65 billion in fees in 2025 and beyond.

Along with Accenture, the list includes Deloitte, General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, Guidehouse, Hill Mission Technologies Corp., Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), CGI Federal, and IBM.

An official within the GSA who has knowledge of the matter told The Daily Upside that at least 1,700 contracts have been canceled since the start of the Trump administration, equating to roughly $4.5 billion in savings.

Regarding GSA’s directive, Accenture chief Sweet said, “while we continue to believe our work for federal clients is mission critical, we anticipate ongoing uncertainty as the government’s priorities evolve and these assessments unfold.”

According to government filings, at least 10 Accenture Federal Services contracts and subcontracts have been “terminated for convenience” under the current administration. The practice allows a party to cancel an agreement without cause.

Shifting winds in procurement aren’t necessarily a negative for some:

• The GSA’s procurement powers were expanded recently — POTUS signed an executive order Thursday putting the agency at the center of contracting common goods and services, including information technology.
• In an earnings call early last week, Toni Townes-Whitley, chief of SAIC, said recent executive orders have had a “nominal” financial impact and that conversations with the administration have been “productive.” She stressed the importance of “outcome-based contracting” and “cutting-edge technology” in the current procurement environment, citing SAIC’s rollout of facial and touchless fingerprint technology to thousands of ICE agents as an example.

Cutting Edge: Companies aligned with what the administration deems necessary spending appear to be faring better than ones that aren’t.

As the US unleashes economic havoc on Canada, politicians inside America’s neighbor to the north are starting to hammer each other.

In other words, it’s campaign season.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney asked the country’s Governor General on Sunday to dissolve parliament for an April 28 federal election. If it couldn’t be more painfully obvious, the number one issue in the election will begin with the letter ‘t’ and end with ‘ariffs,’ but affordable housing also ranks high among voters’ priorities.

Axing and Taxing

Carney took over less than two weeks ago, succeeding former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who agreed to step down in December amid pressure from his own party. The governing Liberals were wildly unpopular and trailing by double digits in polls at the time — the finance minister even quit the cabinet, alleging reckless spending.

But since POTUS threatened he would use “economic force” to turn Canada into the 51st American state and unleashed a raft of tariffs on the country, the Liberals bounced back into a dead heat with the rival Conservatives, led by 45-year-old career politician Pierre Poilievre.

Carney’s resume appears tailor-made for the moment: 13 years at Goldman Sachs, chairing asset management giant Brookfield and terms as governor of the central banks of Canada and England, steering the countries through the late 2000s recession and the Brexit fallout, respectively. And while he and Poilievre have argued over who would be best positioned to stand up to President Trump on tariffs, Carney has seemingly poached some of his Conservative rival’s ideas on other economic issues expected to play a role in the campaign:

• Last week, Carney promised to eliminate a 5% tax for first-time homebuyers on homes worth C$1 million or less. Canada has for years been mired in a worsening housing crisis — with a 3.1 million-unit shortfall forecast for 2030 — and new construction in prohibitively expensive cities like Vancouver and Toronto has slowed dramatically of late. Poilievre, though, made an even bolder pledge than Carney in October to extend the same tax cut to all homebuyers on residences bought for C$1 million or less.
• Carney’s first act in office was to kill a consumer carbon tax, a key policy achievement of Trudeau’s that put a minimum price on carbon-polluting purchases like gasoline and natural gas in order to encourage more environmentally friendly consumption. But the policy earned scorn from the energy sector and voters angry about gas and energy bills — it was also one of Poilievre’s greatest political weapons, as he deployed an “axe the tax” mantra in reference to the carbon levy when he was leading by double digits in the polls.

In his first day of campaigning, Carney added another fiscal promise, this one aimed at middle and lower class voters: a 1% reduction in the country’s lowest tax bracket, which his party said will save a two-income household up to C$825 ($527) per year and benefit 22 million people.

Crisis Actor: Danielle Smith, a conservative firebrand and the premier of energy-rich Alberta, last week threatened a “national unity crisis” unless the next prime minister facilitates her province’s “access to oil and gas corridors” on Canada’s Pacific, Atlantic and Antarctic coasts (read: Builds pipelines to get energy to export). The Quebec government, which has opposed some previous transnational pipeline proposals, has signaled it’s willing to reconsider amid the threat of US tariffs, and as both Poilievre’s Conservatives and Carney’s Liberals push for trade alliances with Europe and other global partners now that the US suddenly appears less reliable.