Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that successful artificial intelligence startups can steal intellectual property and hire lawyers to “clean up their mess.” He said this during a lecture at Stanford University, The Verge reports.

Eric Schmidt made headlines after this lecture. The global media actively covered the former Google CEO’s statement that remote work had weakened the tech giant’s position in AI development.

The video of the interview was eventually removed from the university’s YouTube channel. However, The Verge managed to get acquainted with most of the recording and drew attention to other statements made by Eric Schmidt. The transcript of the interview is available here.

Speaking about the future world in which AI agents will be able to perform complex tasks on behalf of humans, Eric Schmidt gave an unexpected advice.

“If TikTok is banned, here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines,” he said.

The former Google CEO did not stop there and continued to develop his thought.

“So, in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor — and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody’s music — what you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content,” said Eric Schmidt.

Interestingly, he then asked not to be quoted. After that, the former CEO was told about the video recording that was going on. Eric Schmidt then said that the audience understood what he meant.

“Yeah, that’s right. But you see my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done,” he added.

As you know, Eric Schmidt stepped down from Google in 2015, but remains influential in Silicon Valley and an active investor in startups.