OpenAI published about their very general language-writing & comprehension model (a) today.
Interestingly, they're not releasing the model itself:
Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model weights.
Does OpenAI hold a copyright for this model (and its other intellectual property)?
If the US government decided they wanted to requisition this model, would an OpenAI copyright defend against that? Would OpenAI have any real recourse against a government requisition?
The model is trained on web-pages of different (I think so) legal copyright status. Most of web-page owners didn't provide license that their content will be used to train a neural net. So the model is massive copyright violation and could be seized by government. However, the model is nothing without supportive scientists, so it can't be used by an outsider.
The US has criminal copyright law. I thought it was recent, but Wikipedia says it's actually been around since 1897.
The probability of the governemnt trying to USE it in this kind of case is epsilon over ten, though. And as you say, they'd probably lose if they did, because the neural network isn't really derivative of the Web pages, and even if it is it's probably fair use.