Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation: statement of progress
The Copyright and Artificial Intelligence consultation launched one year ago, and the Government are required to produce a report and impact assessments on the options in the consultation.
The consultation received 11,500 responses (including many from illustrators), and the Government have to produce a report and financial impact assessments on the options detailed in the consultation. In mid December 2025 the Government issued a statement of progress which outlines their work to date on copyright and AI and summarises the themes and structure of the report and assessments.
From the 4 options stated in the consultation, the AOI preferred Option 1: ‘Strengthen copyright requiring licensing in all cases’, and in the responses via the government’s online survey service, 88% expressed support for this option.
The other three options in the consultation, in order of preference were:
Option 0: making no changes to copyright law (supported by 7% of respondents)
Option 3: introduction of an exception to copyright for all text and data mining purposes with rights reservation (supported by 3% of respondents). This was the Government’s preferred option.
Option 2: introduction of an exception to copyright for all text and data mining purposes with no rights reservation (supported by 0.5% of respondents).
The government confirmed that there was strong support across the creative industries for the introduction of statutory transparency measures in relation to AI training to support licensing of copyright works. This would require that AI developers reveal what creative content had been scraped for training and how it was used by their generative AI. The report added that respondents from the tech sector had mixed views on transparency, with many supporting non-legislative approaches, or light-touch regulation. This has long been the sector’s overarching view.
The report mentions the Working Groups with representatives from the creative industries and tech companies which have met over the last couple of months, although it is not clear how those will feed into Government’s response.
The report must be put before Parliament before 18 March 2026.
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