Authorship and Data Disclosure Risks in Construction and Design

Originally published to the Oregon Daily Journal of Commerce on December 18, 2025

Contractors and design professionals are rapidly incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) technology into their work. We construction lawyers are striving to keep up with the breakneck pace of technological adoption and evolution and develop ways to protect against emerging risks.  During this period of adoption and change, two risks are emerging, particularly with respect to design work: the effect of AI on copyright and the risks of data disclosure when using AI tools.

Design involves the fixing of work in tangible media — that is, it involves drawing, writing, printing, etc. in physical and electronically stored forms — so designers typically have a copyright in their work that gives them the right to control the use of that work. But design documents, including architectural drawings, technical specifications, engineering reports, and the like, are critical to construction projects, and owners and contractors need to be able to use them for project purposes. As such, contracts with designers typically address issues of copyright ownership and licenses to copy, distribute, and use designs. For example, the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) widely used standard General Conditions of the Contract for Construction provides “the Architect and the Architect’s consultants shall be deemed the authors and owners of their (designs) and retain all common law, statutory, and other reserved rights … including copyrights,” while “Contractor, Subcontractors, Sub-subcontractors, and suppliers are authorized to use and reproduce the (designs) … solely and exclusively for execution of the Work.” This sort of provision may restrict these parties from using the designs on other projects or for other work, or simply distributing them without compensating the designer.

One key component of copyright is authorship — the act of a person creating the work. Under current law, software like AI cannot be a legal author, and fully AI-created work is not protected by copyright. But what about designs for which a human uses AI technology to assist with some of the work? This is an evolving issue in copyright law, but under some circumstances the human user’s input is sufficient to create copyright (as, for example, with photography) and in others there may be no copyright or only limited copyright protection. Questions regarding authorship may jeopardize the allocation of rights and risks in construction contracts with respect to the use and distribution of designs.

Use of contemporary AI tools also presents data security risks. AI use often involves a two-way exchange of information between the user and the tool itself (or, more specifically, the data processing, storage, and server systems utilized by the company or other entity providing the tool). At this stage in the overall integration of AI into workflows and tasks, users’ familiarity with this concept and the methods and processes they use to safeguard information when using artificial intelligence tools vary widely. This is as true in design fields as in any other, and it presents a risk of inadvertent, careless, or intentional disclosure of confidential or sensitive information to third parties when it is uploaded, pasted, or otherwise provided via the software.

The risk of data disclosure is not unique to construction, but the large volumes of data created and maintained for construction projects, which may include confidential or sensitive data like financial information or security system plans, can present substantial risk. A design professional, particularly when working on integrated processes like building information modeling (BIM), can inadvertently disclose data to software or data storage companies by using AI tools, and those companies might use or distribute that data. Both designers and the owners and contractors engaging with them should consider the potential for data disclosure, but allocation of this risk is often an afterthought in construction contracting.

The industry will (perhaps slowly) adapt to the use of AI by designers just as that usage will adapt to the available technologies and the professional and legal requirements that govern design practice. Notably, the AIA’s most recent revision of its major standard contract document sets was in 2017, several years before AI became widely available. Future revisions may address these issues and start to mold industry practice. For now, it is incumbent on forward-thinking designers, owners, contractors, and lawyers to consider whether issues like copyright authorship and inadvertent data disclosure present risk to their projects and, if so, how to proactively allocate those risks in their contracts, project specifications, and processes.