This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.
Last year, our interventions focused on why civil society participation matters, the importance of openness in AI, and the need for local solutions grounded in local contexts. This year, we aim to build on those foundations with a clearer, stronger position on data governance and data sovereignty as prerequisites for a thriving commons. Specifically, we want to talk about building shared governance infrastructure that centers on a democratic and participatory approach, with the ultimate goal of rebalancing power in the ecosystem.
The commons is not an abstract theory or merely a set of values. It is tangible and woven into everyday life. When you read an article not locked behind a paywall, consult Wikipedia, use openly licensed images or music, explore public domain artworks online, or rely on open mapping tools, you are benefiting from the commons.
Today, the commons increasingly takes the form of datasets that train and shape AI systems. These datasets embed human knowledge, creativity, language, and culture. Where this data comes from, who created and stewarded it, and the contexts that give it meaning all matter. These questions are at the heart of data governance and data sovereignty.
For communities in the Global South, these issues are especially urgent. Too often, local knowledge, languages, and cultural expression are extracted, abstracted, and redeployed without meaningful agency, recognition, or benefit flowing back to the people who created them. Addressing AI’s impacts without confronting historical and ongoing asymmetries in power, infrastructure, and representation risks reproducing old patterns of extraction in new technical forms. It is with this in mind that we shape our contribution to AI governance.
As we build our schedule for the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, CC is focused on a set of concrete interventions—areas where our experience, infrastructure, and global community position us to make a distinctive contribution to AI governance in the public interest.
Asserting preferences to communicate how data holders wish their data to be used in AI is at its core a data governance mechanism. Data governance relies on a shared set of rules (formally or informally enforced), as well as a shared vocabulary, both of which require a collective and cohesive approach to be successfully implemented at scale. With decades of experience developing globally recognized, machine-readable licenses, CC is uniquely positioned to help translate expressions of intent into collective, interoperable governance tools that can function at scale.
The process of practicing data governance is often as important as the tools used to express it. CC’s licensing frameworks did not emerge from closed rooms; they were shaped through open, global, and deliberative processes involving creators, institutions, and policymakers.
At the Summit, CC will advance the idea that participatory governance is not a luxury but a requirement for legitimacy—especially in AI systems that affect billions of people. We will explore how CC can continue to evolve its own processes to be more democratic and inclusive as we develop frameworks or legal tools that balance the needs of those sharing and those reusing.
Many current data practices in AI are extractive by design: opaque scraping, unilateral terms of service, and consent frameworks that offer little meaningful choice. CC’s intervention is not to block AI, nor to litigate its development, but to equip creators and data-holding communities with legible, scalable forms of agency.
By supporting collective norms, shared infrastructure, and visible expressions of creator intent, CC can help rebalance power between AI developers and the communities whose work and knowledge underpin these systems. This form of counter-power is especially vital for creators, cultural institutions, and knowledge communities in the Global South, where legal and economic leverage is often limited but cultural contribution is immense.
And how do we tackle these issues while keeping the internet human? How do we preserve trust in information? How do we ensure that guardrails for machines do not create undue barriers in access to knowledge or stifle innovation and scientific discovery? In other words, how do we build an AI ecosystem that operates in the public interest, that is standardized when possible and contextual when required?
At its most fundamental level, data governance is about making decisions, about choice. This is where CC has always lived: not in blunt binaries of open versus closed but in enabling choices that empower human creators and the communities they belong to, alongside the machines they choose to use.
We share the view that the promotion of human flourishing should be the overarching principle guiding data governance. We also believe that a flourishing commons is a prerequisite for human flourishing. The knowledge commons made available through the internet is deeply interconnected with shared resources in the physical world, and both require care, stewardship, and collective responsibility.
If you share our belief that AI governance must center the public interest, respect data sovereignty, and strengthen rather than diminish the global commons, we invite you to connect with us at the AI Impact Summit. Let’s work together to build the future of sharing—open, equitable, and grounded in human flourishing.
If you’ll be in Delhi, you can connect with the CC team, represented by Rebecca Ross and Anna Tumadóttir, at the following places:
Posted 06 February 2026
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