UK data regulator says ten major AI developers have agreed to privacy changes, and turns its attention to AI agents

The UK Information Commissioner's Office has published a report saying ten of the largest foundation model developers operating in the UK have made, or committed to make, data protection changes after its supervision. The companies are Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Stability AI. The ICO says the changes include clearer transparency information, stronger ways for people to exercise their data rights, and tougher assessments of safeguards. It says it is monitoring how the commitments are carried out. The regulator points out that many AI tools, from chatbots to assistants, run on a small number of foundation models trained on large volumes of personal data. That makes changes at the model level relevant to products used across the economy. The ICO is also opening a call for evidence on the data protection risks of agentic AI. It confirmed that it has made enquiries about agentic AI testing and deployment earlier this year, and calls this the next phase of its work on the technology. The announcement does not say which companies or incidents those enquiries involve. For developers and businesses deploying agents in the UK, the call for evidence suggests that regulatory expectations for agent systems that act on personal data may take shape in the coming months.