At the recent Founders Fireside Chat, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig referred to himself as “hopelessly naive.” It struck me that this sort of naivete—the kind that is about believing in the potential for good when sharing knowledge with other humans—is the glue that holds the entire Creative Commons movement together, across borders and belief systems.
Today, it can feel difficult to find that kind of naivete, or hope. In the age of AI, we all necessarily feel small. A lifetime’s worth of creative output becomes a microscopic portion of data in a system functioning at machine scale.
No wonder our avenues for agency feel so small. We seem to have two options: share in a free-for-all system, or close off.
In this unsatisfactory binary, many are choosing to close off, even those who have historically believed in the power of sharing knowledge. We all stand to lose.
Creative Commons wants to create an alternative that sits between the extremes. We think there should be standardized tools for sharing knowledge in ways that reflect the spirit and values of the open movement, while responding to the concerns that many have about unfettered machine access. This is the work we have been doing as part of the CC signals project.
To advance this work, we have been regularly holding convenings and engaging with people at events around the world. We recently held a workshop in London, bringing together policy, legal, and technical experts to discuss the evolution of the CC signals framework into legally enforceable tooling. As with our broader community, the workshop participants held wide-ranging views on the use of open content for AI development, including opposing ones.
A few clear takeaways emerged from the workshop.
While there were dissenters, overall there was a recurring theme that CC is well-positioned to engage in product development designed to help the open movement evolve to meet the needs of the AI environment.
The window of opportunity to influence the AI ecosystem is short before new standards and norms become entrenched.
If we are not careful as a movement, new tooling could go too far to meet the demands of creators in a way that does not result in a net positive for the commons. As CC has done from its inception, we will balance the need for the rights of the public to make use of knowledge with creator agency.
Given the complexity of the legal and technological environment, it is not always clear in advance what will have a meaningful impact. We need to experiment in small ways, rather than trying to solve multifaceted problems at once.
Even among those who agree with the direction toward new tooling, opinions about the details about how the tools could operate vary widely. There are no easy answers, and every aspect of product development will take great care.
All of this has led us to refine a better, and more informed, path forward. We are simplifying our plans for CC signals, breaking them into their component parts as part of a research and development effort to create new tooling. Importantly, we are planning to develop this tooling with a small group of data stewards who will serve as pilot testers. This narrowing will allow us to act quickly with real-life scenarios, while minimizing potential collateral damage as we experiment. The long term goal continues to be a suite of tools available for general purpose use, and we believe this is the fastest responsible way to get there.
Over the next two months, we will be engaging with and learning from potential pilot adopters. If you are a steward of a collection of open content that is used as data for AI development and are interested in being a pilot adopter, please reach out to us at legal@creativecommons.org.
We want to thank those experts who volunteered their time to help us think through these issues – and more – at the workshop. Every varied viewpoint makes for a stronger roadmap. We couldn’t have made this happen without the generous support of Morrison Foerster, providing space, food, and, most importantly, intellectual firepower.
CC Symposium
Save the date for a CC Symposium on Monday, September 21, ahead of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. More details to come.
Posted 06 July 2026
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