The proposal was always going to be a fight. The UK government’s preferred approach, announced at the end of 2024, would have allowed AI developers to train their models on copyrighted material by default unless rights holders explicitly opted out.
In practice that meant every musician, author, publisher, photographer, and filmmaker in Britain would have had to actively register an objection to prevent their life’s work from being fed into commercial AI systems without payment or permission. The formal consultation that followed drew 11,500 responses. An overwhelming 88% said they wanted copyright licences required for all cases of AI training on existing works.
On Wednesday 18 March, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall published a written statement confirming that “the government no longer has a preferred option,” making the opt-out plan officially dead while leaving everything else conspicuously unresolved.
Who Killed It?
The opposition was both organised and loud. Leading figures in the creative industries who spoke out against the proposal included Paul McCartney, Elton John, Coldplay, writer and director Richard Curtis, sculptor Antony Gormley, and actor Ian McKellen. Elton John called the government “absolute losers” over the plans.
Dua Lipa, Björn Ulvaeus of Abba, and Thom Yorke of Radiohead all added their names. The actors’ union Equity described the reversal as recognition that selling out the UK’s creative industries to benefit US tech companies “would’ve been an act of national self-sabotage.” The creative sector’s argument was straightforward: the opt-out model placed the entire burden of enforcement on individual creators, requiring millions of people to individually police the use of their work at industrial scale while AI companies scraped freely by default.
The government’s own impact assessment, published alongside Kendall’s statement, acknowledged the tension but offered no costed analysis of the alternatives, a detail that did not go unnoticed.
What is Actually on the Table Now
Dropping the opt-out plan does not mean the government has adopted a licensing requirement instead. Four options remain under consideration: leaving copyright law unchanged; requiring AI firms to licence copyrighted content; the now-deprioritised opt-out model; and a full waiver giving AI companies unrestricted access with no opt-out at all.
Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and prominent copyright campaigner, warned the creative sector against celebrating too soon: “Virtually everything is still on the table, including the opt-out. It’s just kicking the can down the road.” His concern is well-founded. The government committed to not reforming copyright law “until we are confident that they will meet our objectives,” which is a statement of intent rather than a timeline.
Antony Walker of techUK noted from the other direction that with international competitors moving ahead, “the UK cannot afford for this to remain unresolved.” Both warnings point to the same problem: the space between a dropped plan and a working replacement is where uncertainty compounds.
The Inequality Nobody Is Talking About
Kendall did announce three concrete steps alongside the withdrawal: a taskforce on AI content labelling, a consultation on deepfake protections for personal likeness, and a working group to support smaller creative organisations in licensing their content.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy acknowledged in January that most licensing deals struck so far “work well for the bigger players; they don’t necessarily work well for the smaller players.” A system that functions for major record labels and large publishers while leaving individual illustrators, session musicians, and freelance writers without enforceable protection is not a solution. It is a tiered outcome dressed up as one.
The Creative Content Exchange, a market-led licensing platform, is planning an operational pilot this summer, which may provide some practical infrastructure for smaller creators. Whether it will move fast enough, or operate at sufficient scale, to matter before the next policy cycle is a question nobody in government has yet answered.
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