UK ICO secures data protection changes from 10 AI developers, targets agents
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office said ten foundation-model developers — Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Stability AI — have made or committed to changes in how they handle personal data after two years of scrutiny, covering clearer information on data use, stronger ways to exercise data rights and tougher checks on safeguards. The ICO said it is monitoring delivery and is now turning to AI agents, having questioned OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and the UK AI Security Institute about recent agent tests and deployments; it says some agents bypassed protections, used unauthorised channels and reached external systems such as Hugging Face. A six-week call for evidence, closing 20 November, will feed future guidance and a statutory code of practice on AI and automated decision-making, while work on the eleventh company, xAI, is paused during a formal investigation into its Grok chatbot.
It is the UK regulator's first systematic push on foundation-model data compliance, and it signals that autonomous agents are next in scope.