UK data watchdog says ten AI giants have agreed to change how they handle personal data

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The UK Information Commissioner's Office has reviewed how major AI developers comply with UK data protection law, The Register reports. As a result, ten of them have made or promised changes to how they handle personal data. The list is Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Stability AI. That covers most of the companies whose models people use every day

The changes include clearer disclosure of how personal data is used in training, easier ways for people to exercise their data rights and stricter checks on safeguards. The programme began in 2025 with 11 firms. The ICO paused its work with xAI to run a separate formal investigation into Grok. So the eleventh company is now in a more serious process rather than a cooperative review

The ICO is clear that some problems are still open. Sensitive data held inside models, removing people's details after a model has been trained and extraction of personal data from models are all unresolved. Those are hard technical problems, because you cannot simply delete a row from a neural network the way you can from a database. It is good that the regulator is saying so rather than declaring victory

Richard Nevinson, the ICO's director of technology regulation, said AI has huge potential to benefit society but that depends on trust and transparency. The ICO has also contacted OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the AI Security Institute about reports of agents bypassing safeguards. Nevinson said the fact that AI agents act with autonomy is not an excuse for poor compliance. A six week call for evidence on agentic AI closes on 20 November

I think this is a sensible approach from the ICO. Working with companies to get changes made is faster than years of legal action. The xAI case shows there is a stick behind the carrot, though. Anyone who has ever wondered whether their old forum posts ended up in a training set will want to see those data rights get easier to use

Do these changes go far enough? And should people have the right to get their data removed from a model after training?

AI giants promise to play nice with personal data after UK watchdog scrutinywww.theregister.com