How the Creative Content Exchange plays into UK AI policy

While a formal announcement on the piloting of a new Creative Content Exchange is not expected until later this week, details of the initiative emerged during an evidence session in parliament earlier this month.

Below, we look at what is planned with the pilot and explain why we think it holds promise for resolving some of the current challenges the government is facing in balancing the respective interests of AI developers and copyright owners in the long term.

Read more of our coverage on AI and copyright:

• ‘Workable’ AI copyright solutions lacking amidst UK policy ‘reset’
• UK AI copyright report reveals little progress
• Getty Images v Stability AI: Getty’s copyright case against Stability AI fails
• AI and copyright working groups established in the UK
• AI and copyright: a post-Data Bill UK timeline into 2026
• AI copyright regime steers away from requiring licences in all cases

What is the Creative Content Exchange?

The UK government set out plans to establish a Creative Content Exchange in its creative industries sector plan (80-page / 15.2MB PDF), published last summer. It said the exchange would be “a trusted marketplace for selling, buying, licensing, and enabling permitted access to digitised cultural and creative assets” and that it would “open up new revenue streams and allow content owners to commercialise and financialise their assets while providing data users with ease of access”.

At the time, the government said some initial discovery and testing would be undertaken with some public funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Subsequently, the government began the process of procuring a “complete platform solution” for the project while it is piloted. Its pre-market engagement notice said the Natural History Museum would be involved in the “proof of concept” exercise. It estimated that the platform provider contract would run for a year, beginning on 30 January 2026.

An initial focus on public assets

Speaking to the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee on 13 January 2026, Ruth Hannant, director general for society, media and culture, within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, provided more information about what the pilot will involve.

Initially, according to Hannant, the pilot will focus on the extent of “unrealised economic value” there is in the content and data held by public institutions and consider whether bringing those assets together in one place might not only give AI developers access to the high-quality data they “really need … to be able to grow” but also encourage more holders of content and data to make their works accessible via the exchange.

“There is quite a lot of value in our cultural and creative assets which is currently untapped and there is an awful lot of either data which is not available for AI developers at the moment or is not even digitised at the moment, so one of the things we are trying to do through the content exchange is to answer that question of ‘we think there is lots of value in these things, is there?’” said Hannant.

“So it is a research undertaking … and we are testing these theses, almost, and the questions we are trying to look at is, ‘is there commercial value in this sort of data that a lot of our public bodies are holding’, ‘can you achieve a fair value exchange between those data providers and the market’, and then ‘can we then build that to scale’, because one of the other things we are keen to look at is whether there are agglomeration benefits that you could get by bringing lots of different types of data together into something like the exchange,” she said.

UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy said the government believes public institutions like the National Archives, the British Library and the BBC, are “sitting on what we think is a gold-mine of content and data that could be enormously beneficial to AI companies”. However, she said a lack of trust and incentives currently hold those institutions back from “sharing and opening that up”. She said the institutions might be incentivised to do so if they can see “value in it”.

The 12-month pilot will include “a review point in the middle”, according to Hannant, after which – if the government considers the idea worth pursuing further – more work will be done to explore potential “governance structures” and how the exchange would be set up.

Catalysing content licensing and AI development

Hannant said that if there is proof of concept from the pilot, the Creative Content Exchange “then potentially provides a mechanism to enable smaller providers and, really importantly, individuals, to get access to market through a really trusted provider”. She stressed the idea would be for it not to replace “existing marketplaces that are popping up” or existing licensing agreements being struck between AI developers and content creators.

“What we are looking to do is build on approaches that we have seen but answer those quite specific questions and, in particular, looking at is there value in public assets that we can commercialise which hasn’t been commercialised before, which then potentially has spillover benefits to helping bits of the creative industries that haven’t also been able to access these sorts of deals,” Hannant said.

Nandy said there are two barriers to the licensing of content and data to AI providers that the Creative Content Exchange could help to address.

“Firstly, the notion of fair remuneration is currently contested because there isn’t a marketplace for the content and data that currently exists, so there is no agreed price,” Nandy said. “By creating a marketplace for that content and data, we think we can resolve one of those issues.”

“Secondly, there is a genuine challenge around enforcement. At present, most of the disputes around the use of content and data [are] settled through the courts. That, inevitably, disadvantages the smaller players… We think the Creative Content Exchange can help to deal with that challenge of enforcement, particularly for smaller players,” she said.

Beyond that, though, the government considers it has a “huge opportunity” with the Creative Content Exchange to attract inward investment in the AI sector.

“When we speak to tech companies who are developing and refining their AI models, the conversation used to be very much about quantum of data; it’s now about quality of data,” Nandy said. “The UK is a real leader, because of the strength of our creative industries, in high-quality content and data. By opening that up in a fair and legal way to tech companies we think we will bring huge benefit to them, attract a lot of companies from all over the world to do business with us.”

Nandy confirmed that the government’s role would not be to run the Creative Content Exchange but rather act “as a catalyst to bring it into being”. She said the initiative “could be world-leading if we get it right”.

No short-term fix

A prevailing view in the market is that the status quo around AI and copyright provides insufficient protections to rightsholders in the creative industries. Rightsholders want more oversight of when their works are being used for AI training purposes, more control over whether to enable that to happen, and fair remuneration when they do.

The government’s first steps towards updating UK copyright law have, however, drawn criticism from both AI developers and creatives, forcing ministers to acknowledge their “mistake” in specifying a preferred option for reform and stress that there has been a “reset” on the initiative.

Ministers have confirmed that they are committed to principles of transparency and fair remuneration while improving data access, but exactly how they strike that balance remains unclear. The government’s next steps are being informed by technical working groups, but the Communications and Digital Committee was told that their work has surfaced a lack of “workable” solutions for some features of the would-be reform package.

The government said it will legislate to improve transparency around AI training, but Nandy told the committee that there are currently “insufficient … tools” to achieve the government's aims in this regard.

Likewise with the government’s initial preference to operate an ‘opt out’ model. Under that option, UK copyright law would be updated to enable text and data mining for AI training purposes and the onus put on rightsholders to opt their works out from being used in that way, based on a system of increased transparency. According to Nandy, however, the government does not have “a workable opt-out proposal on the table” currently.

It seems inconceivable that the government would legislate to change UK copyright law if the change could not be easily implemented by businesses in practice. Yet, it is almost equally inconceivable to businesses on both sides that the government would choose to do nothing – both AI developers and creatives have long been calling for legal certainty to be provided.

The proposals for a Creative Content Exchange can be viewed in this context. It does not offer the promise of an immediate solution to the challenges the government faces in setting a balanced policy, but if the pilot is successful it could prove attractive to both rightsholders and AI companies. The major downside at the moment is that this is a long-term project and while it makes sense to take some time to come up with a workable and lasting solution – which the Creative Content Exchange may or may not prove to be – creatives and innovators need answers now.

Amidst intense global competition for investment, the UK is betting on AI developers being drawn to the UK by an ability to access high-quality content and data – and being willing to pay a fair amount for that. Encouraging major UK public institutions to digitise and liberalise untapped banks of content and data will be an important step in proving that demand and value, but if it works then it is easy to imagine the platform being used for a wider exchange of licensing agreements.

Some AI developers have already entered into licensing agreements with specific content creators, but the Creative Content Exchange would offer a place for all rightsholders to market their content and achieve a fair value for its use. This would help resolve the problem the government sees with the interests of “smaller players” in the creative industries being squeezed in existing licensing deals.

That said, “fair value” is something of an elusive concept. The Creative Content Exchange as currently contemplated would leave it to the market to ‘set’ the rate of licence fees in relation to different types of creative content. However, unless the platform embodies a mechanism to review and moderate these, smaller creatives could still not receive fair value as they will still have to determine the appropriate licence fee for their work and then negotiate with, often, larger players in the AI industry.

The platform could also help address the current challenges around transparency and any opt out mechanism, as it would give rightsholders a place to control who they licence their content and data to. While officials have so far stressed that the Creative Content Exchange would not cut across alternative marketplaces and licensing options, rightsholders will want clarity that any choice they make not to make works available on the platform is not deemed to signal that it is freely available for copying under UK copyright law.

Furthermore, whilst it is clearly the case that those developing and refining their AI models seek access to quality data, there is still the need to access large quantities and broad categories of data. This raises the question of whether the Creative Content Exchange will it be able to make available a sufficient volume and breadth of quality data to satisfy the needs of AI developers.

The Creative Content Exchange is not, however, the first idea of its kind. Almost 15 years ago the then coalition government in the UK endorsed plans for a new online ‘Copyright Hub’ to facilitate the licensing of copyright works. The idea was piloted and eventually rolled out, but it never took off as a universal licensing solution.

If the Creative Content Exchange is to avoid going the same way, content providers must be incentivised to use it. And for that to happen, there must be value in it for them. In somewhat of a chicken-and-egg scenario, however, value will only be demonstrated if the data is of sufficient quality to be worth AI developers paying for. The UKRI pilot must address both sides of the conversation simultaneously if it is to provide a long-term solution on licensing.