A working group has been established under the Russian government to address the rules for using copyrighted materials in the development of artificial intelligence. Its task is to find a balance between the interests of developers, media, creative industries, and copyright holders.

Participants will have to determine whether texts, images, films, and other works can be used to train domestic AI models. The issue of who should own the rights to content created with the help of neural networks will be specifically addressed.

The group will also prepare proposals to combat unauthorized use of other people's materials. This refers to cases where copyrighted works end up in training datasets or are used to generate new content without the owners' permission.

The association will include more than 20 representatives of media holdings, film studios, media, industry organizations, and government bodies. The group is headed by Alexandra Kosharnitskaya, editor-in-chief of NTV.

The working group was named "Media Industry and Copyright" and will operate within the government's subcommittee for the development and implementation of AI technologies.

Earlier, book publishers, music companies, and animation creators demanded the introduction of a licensing mechanism for training neural networks on protected works: in their opinion, developers can freely use other people's content without permission and payments to authors. The main fear of the industry is that a neural network studies the style, texts, or voice of a performer, and then imitates them without any compensation.

In parallel, more critical assessments are heard in the State Duma: Pavel Krasheninnikov, head of the committee on state building, warned that AI, without mandatory linkage to copyright, is capable of destroying the very institution of intellectual property and depriving creative people of incentives to create new content. He noted that the norms of the Civil Code on copyright and the law on AI are not yet linked to each other.

Questions about rights to AI content are also addressed by the Ministry of Digital Development's draft law on sovereign AI: the document introduces mandatory labeling of all materials created by neural networks and distributes responsibility among developers, operators, and users. It is in this legislative context that the new working group under the government appears.