The Big Beautiful AI Bill That Solves Nothing and Funds Everything
Congress Just Built an LLM Launchpad With No Idea How LLMs Work
Washington just passed the most significant AI infrastructure bill ever — and if you’re expecting smart governance, technical nuance, or literally any understanding of how modern AI systems function… prepare to be disappointed.
The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” (H.R.1) includes a full section on artificial intelligence, branded under the feel-good label of “transformational models.” But scratch the surface and it’s clear: this is a spend-first, think-never funding mechanism for compute-heavy labs and military contractors. Not a meaningful AI policy.
As someone who lives at the intersection of IP law, tech strategy, and AI infrastructure, I can tell you: the bill gets almost everything wrong.
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🧱 The Good News: We’re Building Compute
There is one win here: the bill acknowledges that access to training-scale compute is a national priority.
The American Science Cloud — a shared infrastructure built across DOE labs and “eligible entities” — could, in theory, support cutting-edge model development outside Big Tech monopolies. If it’s run well (which is a big if), this could democratize access to frontier-scale training environments.
That’s the last nice thing I’m going to say.
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🕳️ What’s Missing Is Everything That Matters
Let’s start with what you won’t find in this bill:
No disclosure requirements for training data
No guidance on copyright liability for AI training
No ownership framework for model outputs
No rules around dual-use or export controls
No incentives for safety, transparency, or open access
They’ve built a taxpayer-funded AI factory and slapped a “science” sticker on it. But they haven’t written a single sentence about what comes out of that factory — or who owns it.
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📜 Ownership? Undefined. Licensing? Unmentioned.
If you’re training a model on federal infrastructure: is it yours? Is it government IP? Is it jointly owned? What happens if you fine-tune an open model using DOE GPUs and later commercialize the result?
The bill doesn’t say. And for founders, investors, and anyone trying to navigate IP in the generative stack — that silence is disqualifying.
This bill funds model development with no licensing rules, no copyright plan, and no accountability structure. It’s a legal minefield masquerading as a subsidy.
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🔐 The Government Is Funding Training. But They Forgot the Lawsuits.
The same week Congress passed this bill, major copyright cases over AI training are moving through the courts. The NYT v. OpenAI case is still live. Getty is suing Stability AI. The legal question of whether model training on third-party data violates copyright is actively unresolved.
And yet the federal government just funded training — at scale — without clarifying how copyright, data rights, or fair use apply.
Imagine building a nuclear facility during a regulatory meltdown and hoping the courts sort it out later.
That’s this bill.
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🎯 The Real Goal: National AI Capacity, Not Public AI Alignment
This isn’t about making AI safe, fair, or accountable. It’s about winning the AI arms race — full stop. The bill’s only real governance mechanism is a vague restriction on foreign entities licensing AI infrastructure with reversion rights.
You can’t own anything if you’re foreign.
You can own anything if you’re domestic.
That’s the extent of the IP policy.
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🧠 I’m Pro-AI. That’s Why I Expect More.
I’m not here to slow anything down. I want better models, smarter automation, and faster innovation. But funding next-gen AI development without even a sketch of legal guardrails is malpractice.
AI doesn’t just need faster compute. It needs a functioning legal layer. And that layer doesn’t exist yet — because Congress keeps funding infrastructure without understanding what they’re unleashing.
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📬 Bottom Line
This bill builds launchpads for LLMs. But it doesn’t regulate what gets launched, who controls the payload, or how fallout will be contained.
We’ve got a federal cloud. But no data rights.
We’ve got lab access. But no licensing framework.
We’ve got security language. But no technical standards.
It’s not a policy. It’s a procurement plan.
And if you’re building, funding, or lawyering around AI, here’s what that means for you:
The government just turned up the volume. But they left the compliance switch off.
Stay sharp. Stay fast. And don’t wait for Congress to figure this out — they’re still Googling what a model checkpoint is.
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