Google AI is no threat to world’s patent and copyright systems, the company’s head of global affairs tells IP industry

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Google’s focus on Artificial Intelligence does not represent a threat to the global Intellectual Property framework, including patents and copyright protections, Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs for Google and Alphabet, said in his keynote address at the Global Forum on Intellectual Property, part of Singapore IPWeek 2026. 

Now is a “critical time of change,” Walker says, driven by two factors: “The tremendous progress in AI and the value of getting these tools in the hands of more people” and “how we realise the promise of AI while still safeguarding creators’ legitimate rights.” 

“Google’s mission has always been to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. AI is a quantum leap in how we make progress against that mission,” he told the audience. “At that same time, and at this conference, we have to ask ‘Can we safeguard creator rights while still delivering on the promise of AI?’” 

His answer was effectively “yes, we can.” 

For patents, he observed, Google has “the largest AI patent portfolio, with some of the most foundational patents on AI technologies” and at the same time has been using its tools, including AI, to help with the patent filing process. “Generative AI tools have compounded the challenge, by making it easier than ever before to write an application. As a result, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, more new patents were published in 2024 and 2025 than in the prior ten years combined.” 

In passing, it should be stressed that the WIPO report is talking about new AI related patents, not all patents. 

Walker added: “If LLMs are turning three bullet points into patent applications, patent offices may need LLMs to turn patent applications back into three bullet points. But at a high level, the patent system is supporting the development and deployment of AI tools.” 

On AI and the global patent system, his speech continued: “There’s no need to tear down an architecture that is working, but there is a need to work together to adapt to a moment of rapid change.” 

Turning to copyright, he said, “the conversation becomes more complex. One key insight is that traditional copyright has always focused on outputs, not inputs. For our part, we are prioritising safeguards for AI outputs as we aim to protect intellectual property while preserving freedom for creative expression.” 

“Our approach includes a range of efforts, from deploying advanced, modality-specific filters that help to prevent AI models from exactly replicating content that might be in the training data, to actively removing infringing material via notice-and-removal systems.” 

But “we believe we don’t have to reinvent the wheel: existing copyright principles are robust. AI is a tool that assists creation. If a user creates an infringing output, it's infringing regardless of the technology used to create it. It doesn’t matter whether a work is created with a pencil or a typewriter, a personal computer, or an AI tool. The legal standard remains.” 

Google’s position, Walker explained, is that “just as it does with traditional creative tools, the law should focus on how an AI tool is used, while recognising the transformative nature of the technology itself. When it comes to liability, the law has always sought to draw a clear line between the tool and how someone chooses to use it.” 

He expands on this argument:  

“In evaluating the training necessary to create AI models, we can likewise draw on our laws governing the creation of words and images inspired by prior works. Human creativity has always drawn on what came before. If students go to a public library, read the books on the shelves, learn how to create plot twists, and then go home to write their own original novels, they have not infringed copyright. They have used those works to learn the craft, the art of how words and passages typically relate to one another. Generative AI training works in an analytically identical way, recognising patterns in what’s come before.” 

Referencing various moves to require AI developers, like Google, to license copyright material for use in AI models, he says: “A legal regime that required developers to get a commercial license for every piece of publicly available data used to train a model would end AI innovation.” 

Instead, “the better approach - similar to those pioneered by Singapore, Japan, and the EU - is to have clear rules around AI training by having clear text and data mining exceptions for training on publicly accessible content. And the courts in India have just followed this approach as well.” 

Google is not against giving “publishers and creators the ability to opt out from having their content used to train or ground a model’s output” and “a balanced copyright framework, with clear text and data mining exceptions, does not preclude commercial negotiations between AI developers and rights holders for access to content - in fact by establishing clear rules of the road, it facilitates those negotiations.” 

Google is “also engaging with the ecosystem to explore new types of partnership and value-exchange models” and has “implemented various rights to opt out, including through controls like Google-Extended, which gives rights holders the ability to say, ‘I choose not to participate in this ecosystem;’ Long-established international protocols like robots.txt, which allow creators to decide whether they want their content to be used for training; and our Updated Search Console protocols, which let website owners manage how their links and content appear in generative AI Search features.” 

Walker “Having a broad right to train and ground, coupled with a machine-readable right to opt-out, offers the reasonable middle way, allowing the benefits of cutting-edge AI while protecting the rights of copyright holders.” 

Of course, machine readable opt-outs are not possible for physical printed material (whether or not that material is still within copyright). Google has developed its own patented systems for reading texts without harming the original printed version. However, recently the issue of other AI companies which have allegedly been buying and then destroying them in order to scan them into AI systems has surfaced in the worldwide media and also in the US courts. 

This recent article in The Guardian, Why is Anthropic destroying books?, references a recent court case in California:  

“An answer to this question can be found in the court documents of Bartz v Anthropic PBC. The northern California district court case, decided in late July this year, highlighted the improbably named “Project Panama,” one of the AI company Anthropic’s efforts to improve its large language model Claude. “What is Project Panama?” court exhibit 21 asks, in an internal memo. The answer: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”” 

Moving back to Google, before closing his speech, Walker turned to the topic of deepfakes: 

“Using an AI tool to create these replicas could harm the reputation of the person or deceive the audience. We believe that both industry and regulators have a role to play in safeguarding against deceptive digital replicas. Industry has a responsibility to build technical guardrails that prevent misuse of our tools and foster trust.” 

He cites as an example how: Google pioneered the industry-leading SynthID tool, which embeds imperceptible watermarks directly into AI-generated images, audio, text, or video, reducing the risk of deception about who created a particular material. We also developed advanced Likeness detection tools on YouTube, scanning our system to identify videos that potentially contain the face of creators. 

Copyright law isn’t the right tool to address this issue, he stressed: “on the government side, we need laws that address this problem. Copyright protects original creative works, not personal identity or facts. So it’s ill-suited for addressing issues like deepfakes. Other sets of laws - those against misappropriating images or fake endorsements - are a better fit.” 

“That’s why in the US, Google supports bills like the NO FAKES Act of 2025 and the TAKE IT DOWN Act to establish clear legal protections against unauthorised and deceptive digital replicas. And we look forward to working with other governments on similar efforts to tailor existing legal frameworks to these new realities.”