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Committee approves bill clarifying ownership of user-created AI models and outputs
Summary
The House committee passed House Bill 1876, sponsored by Representative Scott Richardson (House District 13), to assign ownership of user-provided modeling and AI-generated outputs to the person or business that created them, while leaving the underlying open-source tools outside the bill’s scope.
Representative Scott Richardson, House District 13, presented House Bill 1876 and described it as a measure to clarify intellectual-property rights for businesses and individuals that use open-source generative AI tools. Richardson said the bill distinguishes among three parts of an AI workflow — the tool, the modeling, and the output — and assigns ownership to the party that supplies the modeling and receives the output.
The bill’s central question, Richardson told the committee, is "what's yours is yours and what's not yours shouldn't belong to you." He said the bill does not attempt to change rights in the underlying open-source tools themselves but protects the user-created modeling and resulting outputs. Richardson offered a business example: an engineering firm in Northwest Arkansas that uses an open-source AI tool plus proprietary parameters to produce legal descriptions for documents; he said the firm’s modeling and outputs should remain its competitive property.
The nut graf: the bill aims to encourage market investment and adoption of generative AI by giving businesses clarity that the parameters they create and the outputs they receive belong to them, Richardson said.
In committee discussion, Richardson explained the bill’s three "buckets": (1) the AI tool (e.g., open-source chat models); (2) modeling or parameters a user supplies or develops to guide the tool; and (3) the output produced by the tool. He emphasized that the bill addresses only the second and third buckets — user-created modeling and outputs — and does not alter copyrights or terms tied to the AI tools themselves.
Representative Richardson moved to pass the bill. The committee approved the motion by voice vote; no opposing voices were recorded in the transcript. The committee record shows the bill passed that day.
The committee did not identify statutory citations or cross-references in the transcript; the bill’s text and any implementing definitions were not provided during the presentation. No amendments, conditions, or follow-up tasks were recorded in the committee discussion.
