Ex-Google CEO Says It's Fine If AI Companies "Stole All the Content"

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Worried your AI startup might be illegally swallowing up boatloads of copyright-protected content? According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, you can worry about that later — once you have oodles of cash and a platoon of lawyers, that is.

As caught by The Verge, during a talk at Stanford’s School of Engineering, Schmidt displayed what can only be described as peak Silicon Valley CEO energy. He laid out a hypothetical scenario in which students might use a large language model (LLM) to build a TikTok competitor should the platform ever be banned.

Move Fast, Clean Up Later

Schmidt acknowledged that his imagined scenario raises serious legal and ethical questions — but suggested those issues could be addressed after the fact.

“Here’s what I propose each and every one of you do. Say to your LLM the following: ‘Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines,’” Schmidt told the room. “That’s the command.”

He continued: “What you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is, if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?” Adding that if the product failed to gain traction, “it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content” anyway.

“Do not quote me,” the billionaire added. (Oops!)

Lawyers With Mops

Schmidt later clarified that he “was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody’s music,” despite having just advised students to do precisely that.

In many ways, his remarks capture the AI industry’s long-standing approach to using other people’s content. Companies have scraped vast amounts of human-created material to train their models, and while outlets such as The New York Times have pushed back on copyright grounds, Schmidt framed any resulting IP issues as a “mess” best handled by lawyers after launch.

“Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess,” he told the Stanford students, according to the event transcript. “And that’s typically how those things are done.”

The video was later removed following widespread negative coverage.

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