AI giants promise to play nice with personal data after UK watchdog scrutiny

Ten of the world's biggest AI developers have agreed to tighten their handling of personal data following scrutiny by Britain's privacy watchdog, which is now turning its attention to autonomous AI agents that don't always play by the rules. The recently rebranded Information Commission's Office (ICO) said Thursday that Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Stability AI have either made changes or committed to doing so after the regulator examined their compliance with UK data protection law. These include clearer explanations of how personal information is used to train AI models, better ways for people to exercise their data rights, and tougher assessments of developers' safeguards. The commitments follow a supervisory program launched in 2025 that initially covered 11 developers. That number dropped to ten after the ICO paused its engagement with Elon Musk's xAI to pursue a separate formal investigation into its Grok chatbot. The watchdog isn't declaring victory just yet. …