Jack Conte isn't pulling punches. The Patreon CEO published a blistering essay this week calling out AI companies for what he terms their "bogus excuse" for not compensating the artists whose work trained their models.
"They say licensing millions of creators is impossible," Conte wrote. "We do it every day. It's not impossible. It's just inconvenient for their business model."
The essay comes as OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies face mounting lawsuits from publishers, artists, and writers over copyright infringement. The companies' primary defense has been that training AI models on copyrighted material constitutes fair use, and that obtaining licenses from every creator whose work appears in training data would be technically and financially unfeasible.
Conte, who runs a platform that has paid out over $8 billion to creators since 2013, has the receipts to prove otherwise. Patreon manages compensation for millions of creators, tracking usage, processing payments, and ensuring artists get paid for their work. If a crowdfunding platform can do it, he argues, trillion-dollar tech companies certainly can.
"The infrastructure exists," Conte told Fortune. "The technology exists. What doesn't exist is the will to pay creators fairly when you can legally argue your way out of it."
The timing is significant. Several major lawsuits are working their way through courts, including The New York Times' case against OpenAI and Microsoft, and a class action from visual artists against Stability AI and Midjourney. These cases could establish precedents that reshape the entire AI industry.
Conte's argument strikes at the heart of the debate: whether AI companies' claims about impossibility are genuine technical constraints or convenient business decisions. If Patreon can track and compensate millions of creators with a fraction of these companies' resources, what's the excuse?
