When Bria AI CEO Yair Adato talks about AI, he sounds more like an economist watching a familiar crisis unfold in slow motion, as opposed to the typical startup founder I have spoken to over the years.
“People think about this revolution as a technology revolution,” he said. “It has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about the economy and society. The technology is just an enabler.”
Bria AI is an Israeli company building licensed generative image infrastructure for enterprise clients. It ensures that AI-generated images and videos are controlled, accountable, and compliant by working with stock image providers like Getty and others. These, in turn, train its foundation models while also ensuring royalties and fair compensation for creators.
It has raised more than $66 million from VCs such as Red Dot Capital, Entrée Capital, IN Venture, and others.
When speaking with Adato, it was clear that he believes the product exists because a major obstacle to AI adoption isn’t just about model quality. It is about ownership, provenance, and legal usability.
One consideration in all of this is the concentration of some of the leading players in the AI space. As a handful of American hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI race to control the AI stack, Adato sees the distribution of benefits becoming dangerously narrow. “It’s a question of how the resources will split between current players, future players, and society,” he said. “There is a voice that wants to have all of the resources, all of the benefits of AI, for a few big companies. I think there will be a second voice that tries to split it more equally — because you don’t want to have three companies that basically control the world.”
The idea of companies having a central control in the direction of AI-generated content can be considered a geopolitical problem, not just a market one. We reference similar ideological fault lines that produced competing visions of the internet: Silicon Valley’s open innovation, Europe’s regulatory model, and China’s state control are now reasserting themselves around AI infrastructure.
The outcome of that contest, he argues, will matter more than any individual model breakthrough.
AI’s Spotify Moment
The closest parallel may be the music industry's own reckoning a decade ago. The internet created a data distribution crisis that the music industry fought legally before Spotify resolved it economically — through per-use licensing, attribution architecture, and revenue sharing.
Generative AI is producing a data generation crisis that demands the same kind of structural solution. “Spotify said something really smart,” he explained. “Instead of buying the album, we will let you use it per use, per listening. And every time you hear a song, there is a mechanism behind the scenes to pay the artist.”
Bria AI is building that mechanism for visual artificial intelligence: an attribution engine that tracks which training data influenced a generated image and routes revenue back to the original creators. But Adato is candid about the gap between the vision and the current reality. He acknowledged Spotify’s failure in that the studios got rich, but the artists mostly didn’t. “We try to do it differently… but in many cases, the artist is simply not there.”
The stakes go beyond fairness to individual creators. If synthetic media can replicate everything for free, the incentive to create erodes entirely. “The fact that we can monetize intellectual property is mandatory to continue to develop the economy and society,” he says. “If you cancel the concept of copyright, there’s no reason to create games and movies. There’s no reason to create a brand because it has no value anymore.”
Regulation, he believes, is coming to answer the question the market has so far avoided: Who gets to benefit, and on what terms? “Something will happen,” he says. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how. But something will happen.”
The revolution, it turns out, will not be televised - it will be generated. But whether the economy forming around it is a fair one remains entirely unresolved.
Watch a 5-min preview:
“AI regulation: A geopolitical game between USA, EU, and China”
