Lawfare Archive: Cox and Wyden on Section 230 and Generative AI

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From May 2, 2023: Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content.

On this episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and Matt Perault, Director of the Center on Technology and Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, talked through this question with Senator Ron Wyden and Chris Cox, formerly a U.S. congressman and SEC chairman. Cox and Wyden drafted Section 230 together in 1996—and they’re skeptical that its protections apply to generative AI.

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1:24.2	This week, OpenAI launched SORA 2, an artificial intelligence video and audio generation model that creates realistic videos based on text prompts.
1:32.3	In the days since its launch, SORA2 has lent new force to concerns about AI-generated videos that infringe copyright, defame individuals, generate obscenity or child sexual abuse material or otherwise violate the law.
1:45.7	Whether and how OpenAI will be held responsible for different kinds of unlawful generated
1:49.8	content is unclear.
1:51.4	For today's archive, I picked an episode from May 2nd, 2003, in which Quinta Jurisic and
1:56.9	Matt Peralt sat down with Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, the authors of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
2:03.5	which shields online sites from liability for tortious content posted by third-party users.
2:09.0	They discussed the applicability of Section 230 to AI-generated output,
2:13.7	the purpose of Section 230, First Amendment implications, and more.
2:27.4	Music The purpose of Section 230, First Amendment implications, and more. I'm Quintagresik, Senior Editor at Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare podcast, May 2, 2023.
2:36.5	Today we're bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem.
2:42.6	Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently.
2:46.7	Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230,
2:52.9	the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content.
	...

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