Nick Clegg warns copyright permission laws could cripple AI industry

Speaking at the Charleston Festival in East Sussex to promote his upcoming book How to Save the Internet, Clegg said that the sheer scale of data already scraped from the internet makes it impractical to seek prior consent from every rights holder. “It’s out there already,” he said. “I just don’t see how that would work… and if you did it in Britain and no one else did, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”

Clegg’s comments come amid mounting pressure from the UK’s creative sector. Figures such as Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney have urged the government not to allow big tech firms to exploit their work without consent. The artists argue that their intellectual property should not be freely available for commercial AI training.

While Clegg acknowledged that it seems “not unreasonable” for creators to opt out of such use, he described the idea of requiring permission as “implausible” given the current state of technology. “I think people should have clear, easy-to-use ways of saying, ‘No, I want out of this.’ But expecting the industry to pre-emptively ask – technologically or otherwise – before they even start training, I’m afraid that just collides with the physics of the technology itself,” he said.

Clegg stepped down from his role as Meta’s president of global affairs earlier this year, just weeks before the start of former US President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

Meanwhile, UK lawmakers continue to debate the balance between innovation and creative rights. On Thursday, Parliament voted 195 to 124 – majority 71 – against an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that would have required transparency about when and by whom copyrighted works are used to train AI.

The issue remains a flashpoint between tech companies and creators, with legal, ethical and economic questions around AI and intellectual property still unresolved.