UK Music Chief Hails House of Lords Report Highlighting ‘Clear and Present Danger’ of AI Training

06.03.2026: UK Music Chief Executive Tom Kiehl has welcomed a new House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee report on AI & Copyright, which highlights the 'clear and present danger' generative AI training poses to our world-leading music industry.

The report suggests that the UK can choose one of two paths - become a 'world-leading home for responsible, licensing-based artificial intelligence development' or accept 'large-scale use of unlicensed creative content, allowing damage to our creative industries to go unchecked'.

A series of recommendations are outlined in the report to make sure the UK chooses the right path. These including ruling out a new commercial text and data mining (TDM) exception with an opt-out model for AI training; making transparency about AI training data a statutory obligation; and creating conditions for a fair UK licensing market.

The report also calls for the Government to prioritise the development of sovereign, domestically-governed AI systems so that the UK is not reliant on opaquely trained US-based models.

UK Music Chief Executive Tom Kiehl said: "The UK is at a crossroads and the Government has a choice to make - either become a global leader in ethical and transparent AI innovation, or sell our incredible cultural and creative sectors down the river to unscrupulous big tech firms.

"UK Music welcomes the work of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee and its crucial report into AI, copyright and the creative industries.

"When giving evidence before this Committee as part of this inquiry, I warned that weakening gold standard copyright laws would compromise the £8 billion music contributes to the UK economy, along with the 220,000 jobs it creates. It's great to see the Committee stand by these existing laws and strongly urge government to reject recommendations for an impractical and unethical 'opt-out' model and text and data mining exception.

"The Committee's findings clearly recognise the existential threat generative AI poses to our world-leading industry and the need for strong support from the Government to ensure the music industry continues to thrive for generations to come."

Committee Chair Baroness Keeley said: "Our creative industries face a clear and present danger from uncredited and unremunerated use of copyrighted material to train AI models. Photographers, musicians, authors and publishers are seeing their work fed into AI models which then produce imitations that take employment and earning opportunities from the original creators.

"AI may contribute to our future economic growth, but the UK creative industries create jobs and economic value now. In 2023 the creative industries delivered £124bn of economic value to the UK and this is set to grow to £141bn by 2030. Watering down the protections in our existing copyright regime to lure the biggest US tech companies is a race to the bottom that does not serve UK interests. We should not sacrifice our creative industries for AI jam tomorrow.

"The Government should now make clear it will not pursue a new text and data mining exception with an opt-out mechanism for training commercial AI models. Instead, it should focus on strengthening UK protections for creators, including against unauthorised digital replicas and 'in the style of' uses of creators' work and identity. The Government's task should be to create the conditions that will allow a licensing-first approach to AI training to flourish, backed by effective transparency requirements and technical standards for data provenance and labelling, so that rightsholders and developers can participate confidently in this emerging market.

"The future for AI in the UK should be based on transparent and responsible use of training data. We are calling on the Government to embrace the opportunities this presents, and to demonstrate its commitment to the UK's gold-standard copyright regime and our outstanding creative industries in its forthcoming economic assessment and update on AI and copyright."

You can read the report in full here.