While acknowledging the constitutional and institutional limits of United States energy federalism, the Article contends that meaningful reform remains possible through measures that promote reliability and long-term planning. It concludes that the United States economic and technological leadership in the AI era requires a durable, whole-of-government energy policy that supports all forms of energy generation and unites generation, transmission, and distribution within a coherent framework capable of supporting both innovation and sustainability.

The article explores Damien Riehl’s All the Music project (ATM) and his arguments for why ATM’s outputs should be protected as a case study that AI-produced music is uncopyrightable and that melodies are more than uncopyrightable facts. The article shows that U.S. copyright law does not recognize machines as “authors” for copyright purposes, that reducing melodies to “just math” conflicts with mainstream legal and musicological understandings of melody, and that even if ATM’s outputs were copyrightable, most of its “melodies” would fail for lack of originality. Projects like ATM neither free existing melodies from copyright protection nor meaningfully reduce the risk of infringement litigation for musicians.