This report summarizes the European Commission’s 2025–2026 stakeholder consultation on how General-Purpose AI (GPAI) providers should comply with copyright-related obligations under Article 53(1)(c) of the EU AI Act and the Copyright Chapter of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (CoP).
The consultation focused on machine-readable “opt-out” mechanisms that allow copyright holders to prevent AI systems from using their content for text and data mining (TDM), as required under EU copyright law.
The Commission wants to identify a list of technically feasible and broadly accepted opt-out protocols that AI model providers should respect when crawling the web for training data.
The consultation supports implementation of:
robots.txt and potentially other recognized machine-readable opt-out standards.The final goal is to establish an EU-recognized set of acceptable opt-out protocols.
The consultation establishes that there is a strong disagreement between rightsholders and evaluates 7 opt-out protocols.