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Watch Partner Perspectives: Legal Strategy Meets AI Innovation

Introducing Partner Perspectives — a new short-video series by White & Case featuring insights from our lawyers on the legal and business trends shaping tomorrow. In this episode, White & Case partners Erin Hanson, Hope Anderson and Tim Hickman discuss key considerations for companies as they align their AI product strategy and legal strategy.

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Last week, a copyright infringement lawsuit between Warner Music and Suno, an A.I. music generation company, settled as the two companies announced a new “groundbreaking partnership.” As part of this, Suno will launch new licensed models next year, and introduce download restrictions for free accounts. Warner, while referencing “new revenue streams” for artists and songwriters, said the collaboration will allow for an element of interactivity that will enable “deeper fan engagement.”

As with the very similar enemies-to-lovers settlement between Universal Music Group and Udio in October, artists will have full control over whether to participate in the new platform and how their work shows up in A.I.-generated outputs. Suno also acquired Songkick, a concert discovery platform, from Warner in the deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.

And now for the main event…

Last Monday, David Sacks, the venture capitalist moonlighting as Trump’s A.I. and crypto czar, wrote on X that reversing America’s massive investments in A.I.—which might have accounted for half of G.D.P. growth in the first six months of the year—would “risk [a] recession.” This was an unsurprising pronouncement from Sacks, whose occasionally somewhat self-serving Silicon Valley boosterism has helped set the tone for the administration’s tech policy. For better or worse, the White House’s economic goals are now deeply entwined with the success of hyperscalers that have committed trillions of dollars to the A.I. arms race.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, just a few hours later, President Trump published an executive order launching the Genesis Mission, a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of A.I.‑accelerated innovation and discovery”—one that “can solve the most challenging problems of this century.” Chris Wright, the U.S. Energy secretary, claimed somewhat loftily that the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project were its natural progenitors.

Unlike the Manhattan Project or Apollo, however, the Genesis Mission effectively codifies a technological race without a clear finish line. In practice, the E.O. calls for building an integrated platform using proprietary federal scientific datasets “to train scientific foundation models and create A.I. agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” Makes sense: The government presumably has access to massive quantities of data from decades of research on everything from fusion to biotech and advanced manufacturing. With “resources available through industry partners,” you simply feed all that data into model training and start generating new discoveries. Easy, right?

Notably, the mission will be overseen by the Department of Energy rather than the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the National Science Foundation. Wright has been charged with submitting 20 scientific and technological challenges of national interest—which will likely focus on energy technology, biotechnology, and advanced computing frameworks—within the next two months. These will be updated on an annual basis.

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Watch Partner Perspectives: Legal Strategy Meets AI Innovation

White & Case partners Erin Hanson, Hope Anderson and Tim Hickman explore how AI companies can align legal strategy with product development from the outset. From data governance to global regulation, the message is clear: “AI is moving fast. So is the law. The winners will be those who align early.”

Watch the video

In many ways, the administration’s goals here align with policy proposals that Silicon Valley A.I. firms have sent to Washington—namely, to dramatically accelerate “A.I. development and utilization,” which has been a core tenet of the executive action Trump has taken thus far. To that end, the Genesis Mission will involve a massive public-private partnership between government agencies, university researchers, and private companies. The list of private collaborators currently features more than 50 businesses, including Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Hugging Face, Quantinuum, IBM, HPE, Nvidia, and AMD. (Elon Musk’s xAI is conspicuously absent.)

After the announcement, I spoke with Hugging Face C.E.O. Clément Delangue, who expressed profound excitement about the Genesis Mission. “We’ve experienced firsthand how more openness and collaboration in the U.S. can massively accelerate progress,” he told me. “In my opinion, that’s what led to the current A.I. boom and U.S. leadership [in the field].” Delangue added that there are already thousands of open science models and datasets on Hugging Face’s platform, and said that he expects to see “an order of magnitude more” over the next few months, specifically from federal agencies like the D.O.E.

One major outstanding question is the provenance of the cash. Will the government issue contracts, as it did with the Apollo program? Or will it effectively function as a customer for these businesses? How much money will be allocated to this project? (The Department of Energy didn’t respond to questions seeking clarity on this point.) But the order is intent on incentivizing private-sector participation through “coordinated funding opportunities or prize competitions across participating agencies”—an undefined process partly under the aegis of Sacks, whose influence as a special government employee continues to grow despite an investigation from several Democrats into whether he’s overstayed his term.

Asad Ramzanali, the director of A.I. and tech policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, told me he’s worried about the risk of federal dollars servicing private enterprise, all under the nebulous guise of the public good. And he has a point—even if you’re the sort of A.I. maximalist who views the tech as a crucial front in the U.S.’s cold war with China. The Apollo program cost $25 billion—roughly $250 billion today. In its peak year of funding, the Manhattan Project made up around 1 percent of federal outlays, and the Apollo program made up around 2 percent. If the Genesis Mission is anywhere near as ambitious, there will be a lot of money up for grabs—and Trump’s executive order doesn’t exactly make it clear how different stakeholders will benefit.

Meanwhile, this push to accelerate A.I. growth and “unleash” science comes in the wake of Trump’s own efforts to slash federal research budgets, including those at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Still, Ramzanali said, “There’s real promise here,” since the National Labs already have powerful supercomputing capability and the federal agencies possess vast, useful sets of data. But he’d like to see more than just a massive data center build-out: For instance, he hopes university researchers might gain access to federal funding to expand research initiatives, along with the use of the new public infrastructure envisioned in the E.O.

However, Ramzanali remains concerned about the possibility that this project might be used as a justification to preempt state-level regulation of A.I., for instance, or otherwise simply allow the A.I. hyperscalers to continue their unchecked growth. “At the end of the day, it does come down to how this is implemented,” he said. “I think that when the government relies on private sector entities, there’s a heightened level of transparency required. And I hope that that plays out—that we actually get to see the details of who’s doing what.”

That’s all for today. I’ll see you on Thursday.

Ian

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