We are in the middle of a profound technological revolution driven by artificial intelligence. While the hype around AI can be exhausting, there is no question the technology will keep reshaping daily life. Lawsuits, policy papers, and even new laws are emerging as societies try to understand and respond to this upheaval. But these legal and technical shifts do not exist on their own.
Tech billionaires shift right, legacy media loses its grip
Donald Trump’s return to the White House is going to have massive repercussions for AI policy. I’m surprised this hasn’t been discussed more broadly in the music industry, because I think it will be pivotal.
Elon Musk’s full embrace of Trump is just one sign of a strong shift to the right among America’s tech elite. Peter Thiel was always a conservative pillar, but Trump is now drawing support from a much wider circle of venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen, who has been crystal clear in his view that copyright shouldn’t stand in the way of data-scraping or so-called “fair use” of music. Crypto advocates, too, have joined the cause, with JD Vance backed by deep-pocketed tech donors. Other tech billionaires who had previously leaned Democratic, like Zuckerberg and Bezos, have either pivoted to Trump or gone conspicuously silent, no doubt anticipating his victory. And Bill Ackman, who controls Pershing Square Holdings and is the largest shareholder of Universal Music, has publicly lined up behind Trump as well.
At the same time, legacy media is losing power at breakneck speed. The decline of TV, cable news, and traditional print has been clear for years, but the 2024 election was a harsh reminder of how little influence they have left. Influencers, podcasters, and alternative platforms now hold the audience, while big-name celebrity endorsements had almost zero effect for Kamala Harris. Even Taylor Swift couldn’t move the needle in Harris’s favor.
A fractured Right: deregulation vs cultural defense
This convergence, a politically empowered tech sector and a weakened traditional media landscape, is going to be decisive for AI. On one side you have an industry determined to push generative AI no matter the consequences. On the other, creative industries and legacy publishers are fighting for regulation or at least for enforceable licensing deals to protect their livelihoods. With a government that is firmly pro-tech, AI will almost certainly get a green light.
But the American Right is no longer moving in a unified direction when it comes to technology policy, and nowhere is that break more striking than in the battle over music copyright. What was once a conservative consensus favoring deregulation and market-led progress is fracturing into a messy, high-stakes fight over the very soul of American culture.
From democratization to exploitation
The same movement that once championed permissionless innovation now includes a growing populist wing that sees unchecked technology, especially artificial intelligence, as a direct threat to its values, its livelihoods, and its heritage.
Jason Hausenloy, researcher for the Center of AI Safety describes this rupture as the collision of the “Tech Right” and the “Populist Right,” a split that has spilled straight into the recording studio.
Venture-backed AI music companies like Suno, Udio, and even broader players such as Anthropic have been eager to pitch their algorithms as tools of creative empowerment, promising to “democratize” production by generating royalty-free beats, instantly cloned vocals, or complete tracks that sound radio-ready in seconds. From their vantage point, this is an American triumph: algorithms make the creative process cheaper and more accessible, reinforcing U.S. soft power across the globe.
But labels and rights-holders see the same tools as built on an enormous act of industrial-scale theft. Decades of copyrighted recordings, the fruits of 100 years of human artistry, have been scrapped and repurposed as training data without so much as a licensing check or a royalty paid.
Tennessee and the sound of resistance
Lawsuits from major publishers against Suno and Udio are not, as libertarian boosters, VCs and Tech Bros would say, an attack on innovation. They are a warning shot against a business model that turns creative labor into raw machine fuel under the pretense of fair use.
If the Tech Right sees this fight as the inevitable march of progress, the Populist Right is writing an entirely different anthem. Nowhere is this more visible than in Tennessee, where Governor Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act, a landmark law recognizing an artist’s voice and likeness as a protected property right, specifically to block unauthorized AI clones. The symbolism of signing this bill on Lower Broadway, in the shadow of the Grand Ole Opry, could not have been clearer.
In this worldview, music is more than content; it is a cultural patrimony rooted in family, faith, and place. In Washington, Senator Marsha Blackburn joined with Democrat Chris Coons to advance the NO FAKES and COPIED Acts, forging rare bipartisan consensus around a federal framework to punish unauthorized AI-generated vocals and performances.
For these conservatives, stopping synthetic Johnny Cash clones is not just a matter of royalty protection. It is an act of cultural self-defense against a “machine god” that seems determined to rewire the sound of America itself without its permission.
The populist revolt against Big Tech protectionism
Can Trump hold the Tech Right and Populist Right together? And following the Trump-Musk divorce, it is only going to get easier for the anti-innovation Populist Right to suggest that many other tech leaders , and their AI innovations , should be tossed overboard next.
The deepening fault lines broke fully into view during this year’s spectacular collapse of a Republican-backed moratorium that would have frozen state-level AI regulation for a decade. Silicon-friendly conservatives, including Senator Ted Cruz and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, had argued that a patchwork of local AI rules would cripple American firms in the competition against China. But populist conservatives like Marjorie Taylor Green refused to budge, seeing the moratorium as a giveaway to Big Tech that could undermine hard-won state protections for artists and children alike.
In a stunning rebuke of traditional GOP deregulatory instincts, the Senate voted 99–1 to kill the measure. For the first time in decades, conservative priorities placed local cultural guardianship over the absolute freedom to innovate. That vote showed just how unsteady the old coalitions have become, and how powerful the populist realignment really is.
More than money: the spiritual weight of music
Yet the pushback is about more than economics. Hausenloy likens the current AI craze to a modern Tower of Babel, and that metaphor lands with special force in the genres beloved by faith communities on the Right. Whether in worship choruses, country ballads, or the hymns passed down across generations, music has always carried moral and even spiritual weight.
For these communities, hearing a generative model spit out a synthetic gospel track or an AI-generated country twang is not just an artistic affront, it can feel like outright blasphemy, proof that tech elites would rather manufacture culture than nurture it. The Tech Right too often brushes off these objections as panicky or uninformed, a kind of “technopanic” reaction that can be explained away with market logic. But they miss something essential: moral authenticity still matters to millions of people. When it is ignored, the distance between Silicon Valley and Main Street only grows.
Copyright is labor
Beneath all these moral and spiritual questions also lies a classic capital-versus-labor standoff, reframed for the age of generative algorithms. Music, after all, is an ecosystem in which capital, from labels to catalogs to AI startups, depends intimately on labor: songwriters, session players, engineers, and vocalists whose creativity is the bedrock of the entire enterprise.
Generative models, however, require enormous amounts of high-quality, labeled data, and the most valuable datasets are protected by copyright, performed by living, working artists, and non-fungible in their uniqueness. A recent Senate policy brief warned that AI models could cut musicians’ incomes by as much as 25 percent within four years, as training sets devour the fruits of their labor without any licensing payments or bargaining leverage.
When the RIAA brands Suno and Udio as “mass infringement engines,” it is more than a rhetorical flourish. It is a recognition that this is not just a question of intellectual property law but a labor fight, dressed up as a copyright war.
A shared score, if we want one
If any settlement is to last, it will have to reckon with new royalty systems, licensing frameworks, and even collective bargaining agreements that treat data as a negotiated input, not a public resource to be seized. There is a pathway to bridge this cultural and political divide. To hold the conservative coalition together while protecting artists and their communities, a shared score will have to emerge. That means designing policies which respect property, reward creativity, and still allow innovation to flourish.
One route would be to establish opt-in licensing for training datasets, or at minimum a robust opt-out system, giving musicians and labels the power to price their work instead of seeing it scraped without permission.
At the federal level, a consistent right-of-publicity baseline could safeguard artists’ voices against unauthorized cloning while leaving space for states like Tennessee to go even further.
Transparency requirements could force AI services to disclose which songs and voices influenced a particular output, opening the door for audits and micropayments similar to traditional mechanical licensing. Finally, policymakers could tie future liability shields for generative models to verifiable investments in watermarking, alignment, and provenance technologies, reassuring skeptical conservatives that culture will not be hijacked invisibly by machine manipulation.
It's not just tech, it's everything
The stakes are high. The music industry is a vivid microcosm of why the Right’s realignment on technology may prove irreversible. The same political base that cheers free markets in semiconductors will not stand by quietly while the irreplaceable timbre of Willie Nelson or the vocal magic of Taylor Swift is replicated, commodified, or even replaced by machines.
If the Tech Right wants to preserve its dream of a robust, globally competitive AI sector, it will have to anchor its promises in a profound respect for the human creators who have made America’s musical heritage what it is.
If the Populist Right wants to protect culture from reckless exploitation, it will also have to resist the temptation of blanket bans that might suffocate healthy, fair experimentation.
Priority of Tech Right allies , to build out world-leading computational capacity to counter the China threat is now itself directly threatened by a populist movement that is hell-bent on destroying a digital technology sector. This is a sea change in approach to innovation and technology policy for all of us. Until then, we will NEVER trust AI lobbyists who impose extinction risks on our kids under the guise of 'acceleration', or 'arms races', or 'freedom to innovate'.
LINKS
🧠 a populist awakening on AI
The Populist Awakening on AI (Jason Hausenloy)
“We’re witnessing a spiritual and ideological realignment where populist conservatives now view AI and tech not as tools of freedom, but as threats to identity, family, and faith”
“As we get more powerful AI systems, the populist Right is likely to become more comfortable with government intervention to protect their lives and livelihoods.”
✘ Essential context: this explains why the Right is splitting, and why AI is no longer a unifying issue.
🍼 the anti-innovation tech manifesto
A future for the family: a new technology agenda for the Right (First Things manifesto)
“A new era of technological change is upon us. It threatens to supplant the human person and make the family functionally and biologically unnecessary.”
“We must enact policies that elevate the family to a primary constituency of technological advancement.”
✘ This manifesto signals a conservative backlash, not against AI’s promise, but its power, and shifts the debate from innovation to cultural protection.
🔥 the radicalism of the anti-tech turn
The radicalism of the ‘Future for the Family’ technology manifesto (Adam Thierer)
“The authors are not just skeptical of tech — they are actively calling for sweeping restrictions that would have seemed unthinkable to conservatives a decade ago.”
✘ Thierer exposes how a party that once championed free innovation is now embracing bold regulations to defend traditional values.
🎭 can Trump hold the factions together?
Can Trump hold the Tech Right and Populist Right together? (Adam Thierer)
“The ‘tech right’ and ‘populist right’ united to help return President Donald Trump … but this is not a natural alliance.”
“Trump’s coalition contains two forces with irreconcilable goals: one wants unlimited innovation, the other wants control and protection.”
✘ Highlights the tension at the heart of the Right — and why AI copyright in music becomes a battlefield, not just a policy issue.
👥 continuing tech policy realignment
The continuing tech policy realignment on the right (Adam Thierer)
“Much of Jason Hausenloy’s analysis … reflect[s] a deeper spiritual dimension for many populist conservatives who view the Internet, AI, and modern information technology as an existential threat.”
✘ This recent analysis seals it: a schism is underway, and it’s reshaping what conservatives believe about AI and how they govern it.
MUSIC
I spent my weekend watching videos of the first Oasis reunion concert in Cardiff. The joy. People in tears. Fathers and kids dancing together. And then… the opener. The king: Richard Ashcroft. Honestly, I’d be happy just with a Richard Ashcroft concert.
The emotion in the crowd when he played Lucky Man, Sonnet… But the apotheosis was, of course, Bitter Sweet Symphony. One of the most epic, beautiful, instantly recognizable songs of our time. The Verve. And seeing him on stage, smiling, in full voice, and the entire crowd singing every word, lyrics we’ve carried with us for more than 20 years, it brought me right back to when I was glued to MTV, just waiting for that video to come on.
And I don’t know… I think we’ve lost some of that. That collective moment. That emotional wave music can carry across thousands of people at once. The memories it brings. The bobs, the Adidas jackets, the Clarks, it pulls us back to something warmer. Life was a bit easier. Maybe even better music.
What’s happening with music now? Can we find that power again? Can we feel that kind of emotion through AI? Will it ever move us like this again?
Anyway, I’ve made my decision. I want to go to the Wembley date just to see Ashcroft live, since he’s not playing in LA. And for the british fever! So if anyone knows someone who knows someone selling tickets… I’m here! Happy to trade my LA tickets if it helps ;)
Thank you for being a strong voice and for your insights, Virginie!!