Last month, we published a preview of what we intended to bring to the AI Impact Summit in Delhi: a focus on data governance, shared infrastructure, and democratic approaches to AI that genuinely advance the public interest rather than replicate existing power imbalances. That piece outlined our core interventions and the principles that have guided our thinking as we grapple with how to ensure openness, agency, and equity in the age of AI. 

Over the past year,  we’ve been engaged in a series of conversations with a small group of researchers specializing in IP, AI policy, and data governance about what CC  licensing means—and does—in African contexts today. What started as an organic exchange in various spaces has revealed something larger: a strong appetite to move these conversations into the open. At stake are not only questions about CC licenses but deeper issues of data sovereignty, equity, governance, and power in global knowledge systems.

This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.

Distorted Forest Path © by Lone Thomasky & Bits&Bäume is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Here at CC, we have the goal of defending and sustaining the digital commons in the face of developments in artificial intelligence. We’ve recently introduced a new framework, CC signals, to offer a new way for stewards of large collections…

Signals © 2021 by Hugo Parasol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 In June we kicked off a public feedback period on our proposal for CC signals. CC signals is a preference signals framework designed to sustain the commons and ensure the continued sharing of knowledge in the age of AI.  The goal is to…