Big Tech leaders are spending millions of dollars — and pushing dubious national security concerns — to try to prevent federal regulators from forcing them to pay for the copyrighted works their companies are using to train their artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

At issue is a new effort by the US Copyright Office to consider how to apply US copyright law to the nascent AI industry. The matter has triggered impassioned pushback from powerful tech interests who say they must have access to people’s hard work for free, or the future of their industry will be jeopardized.

The fight comes as artists, actors, news organizations, and others have sued AI companies using their work to train the emergent technology on how to create images in the style of certain artists, replicate voices of singers, write new literature based on copyrighted works, and many other instances in which original work is being harvested off the internet free of charge.