Has the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) identified good and bad companies in relation to generative AI development?
Whether you like it for not, generative AI models require training data. In the United Kingdom, companies are required to obtain that training data “lawfully, transparently, and with effective safeguards in place.”
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has established the following requirements for companies training generative AI models:
- identify a lawful basis for doing so;
- provide meaningful transparency;
- enable people to exercise their rights; and
- show that you have safeguards in place to materially reduce risk.
Biometric Update identifies the companies that have pledged to abide by these principles: Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Stability AI.
You might notice one notable company that is missing. The ICO explains why:
“We’ve opened formal investigations into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) and X.AI LLC (X.AI) covering their processing of personal data in relation to the Grok AI system and its potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content.”
Of course the UK effort suffers from the same drawback that the U.S. effort does. It only applies in a single country. All the other countries can go ahead and do their own thing.
