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ARTICLE · 13 NOVEMBER 2026

ICO Secures Data Protection Improvements From Leading AI Developers: What This Means

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The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has published a landmark report revealing that ten major AI foundation model developers have committed to significant data protection improvements following regulatory scrutiny.

United KingdomPrivacy
Emma Erskine-Fox
Emma Erskine-Fox
Sol Pearson
Sol Pearson

The Information Commission's Office (ICO) has published a significant new report confirming that ten of the world's largest foundation model developers have made, or committed to make, data protection improvements following regulatory supervision by the ICO. The report also sets out the ICO's broader expectations for model development, making the report of interest to developers beyond the ten named.

This comes at the same time as the ICO has launched a call for evidence on agentic AI. We explore this update further in our recently published "The ICO's agentic AI call for evidence: what you need to know" article.

Why this matters

The ICO identified the importance of foundation models, which can be adapted for a vast range of different purposes, given their widespread usage in AI systems operated by organisations across the UK. These are trained on vast datasets that would be expected to include significant volumes of personal data.

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