President Donald Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, who led the U.S. copyright.

CBS News and Politico reported the firing, which appeared to be a statement from Joe Morelle, the top Democratic representative of the House Executive Committee.

"Donald Trump terminated the copyright register, and Shira Perlmutter is a rough, unprecedented power without legal basis," Morel said. "After her efforts to deny Rubber-Stamp Elon Musk's efforts to dig into copyrighted works that train AI models, his actions are certainly not accidental."

Perlmutter took over the copyright office during the first Trump administration. She was appointed by Congress librarian Carla Hayden, who Trump fired this week.

Trump mentioned the news in his social network truth social network, when he “reviewed” posts linked to CBS news articles from a post by lawyer Mike Davis. (Confusingly, Davis appears to be critical of the firing, writing: "Now, the tech brothers will try to steal the creators' copyright of AI profits.")

As for how this is related to Musk (a Trump ally) and AI, Morelle is related to a pre-publication version of the U.S. Copyright Office report released this week, focusing on copyright and artificial intelligence. (In fact, it is actually the third part of the longer report.)

The Copyright Office said in it that while it is “unable to prejudice” the outcome of individual cases, there are restrictions when AI companies can treat “fair use” as a defense. For example, the report may allow for research and analysis.

“Business uses a wide range of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in the existing market, especially in the case of achieving this through illegal access, which goes beyond the boundaries of fair use.”

The Copyright Office continues to suggest that government intervention “will be too early for now” but it expresses its hope that the “licensing market” AI companies pay copyright holders the “licensing market” where their content “should continue to grow”, adding that “there should be considered an alternative approach to addressing any market failure.”

AI companies, including OpenAI, are currently facing many lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement, and Openai also calls on the U.S. government to compile a copyright strategy that gives AI companies a leeway through reasonable use.

Meanwhile, Musk is both the co-founder of OpenAI and a competitive startup called Xai (merged with the former Twitter). He recently expressed support for Square founder Jack Dorsey's call for "delete all IP laws."