Ten Major AI Firms Commit to Stronger Data Protection After UK Regulator Pressure

Ten major AI companies have made, or committed to make, changes to their UK data protection policies after the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the British privacy watchdog, called for greater transparency. The companies are Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Stability AI. Their commitments include clearer information about how data is used, stronger ways for people to exercise their rights, and tougher assessments of safeguards.

In a report on data privacy in agentic AI, published on October 8, the ICO said it is asking foundation model developers to have clear data protection policies when they use personal data to train models. The regulator said it is monitoring progress against the commitments, and that its approach will remain pragmatic, evidence-based and proportionate. It has also opened a six-week call for evidence, with responses due by November 20, and has already made enquiries with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the UK's AI Security Institute about recent agentic AI testing and deployment.

The ICO warned that trust is under threat, as reports increasingly show it is feasible to extract model training data. That data can come from the internet and may include sensitive details such as email signatures, API keys and passwords, which could potentially be exploited to gain malicious access to systems and more information.