The European Committee of the Regions has adopted an opinion urging the EU to put creators and performers in meaningful control of how their work is used by generative artificial intelligence, adding the voice of Europe’s cities and regions to a rapidly hardening copyright fight. The opinion, Culture Compass for Europe, was adopted on 13 October at the committee’s Brussels plenary, with Tanya Hristova, the Bulgarian mayor of Gabrovo, as rapporteur. It argues that the EU’s cultural strategy cannot treat AI as a simple productivity tool when models can be trained on protected music, text, images and performances.
Its immediate legal force is limited: the Committee of the Regions is an advisory EU body, not a legislature. But the intervention lands as the Commission prepares a dedicated AI strategy for the cultural and creative sectors, expected in early 2027. The committee’s position therefore raises the political cost of a policy that promotes AI innovation while leaving artists to discover, after the fact, that their work has fed a commercial model.
The demand for creator control does not settle the technical or legal question of how it should work. It does, however, place a clear principle before Brussels: a performer, writer or visual artist should not lose control of a work merely because it can be copied, sorted and absorbed at industrial scale.
A cultural policy becomes an
AI test The underlying Culture Compass was launched by the European Commission on 12 November 2025, replacing the 2018 New European Agenda for Culture. It frames culture not as an adjunct to the single market but as part of Europe’s democratic resilience, economic life and social cohesion. The Commission says the cultural and creative industries comprise more than 2 million enterprises, generate about €199 billion in value added and employ 7.9 million people across the EU.
That scale explains why the AI argument has moved beyond a niche copyright dispute. The Commission’s Compass itself identifies unauthorised use of protected material in training generative models, fair remuneration, job displacement and cultural diversity among the risks posed by AI. It also presents AI as a potential source of innovation, setting up the central policy tension: Europe wants competitive AI systems, but its cultural sector is asking whether those systems can be built without stripping creators of bargaining power.
The regions’ opinion pushes firmly toward the second side of that balance. Its significance lies less in creating a new rule than in connecting copyright to the lived economics of local culture: small theatres, independent labels, translators, galleries, musicians and heritage institutions rarely have the legal staff or negotiating leverage of a global technology company. An earlier opinion from the European Economic and Social Committee pointed to a possible compromise, urging the EU to foster licensing markets for AI-training content through appropriate framework conditions and incentive-based regulation.
That approach would not ban the use of cultural material in AI development; it would seek a route in which permission and payment are built into the market.
The next contest is over enforcement The
Committee of the Regions has not supplied a binding enforcement regime, and its opinion does not rewrite the EU’s copyright directives or the AI Act. The unresolved question is whether “control” will mean practical tools—clear disclosure of training sources, workable licensing systems and routes for rightsholders to challenge unauthorised use—or remain a broad cultural aspiration. That question is already being tested in court.
In March, the Court of Justice of the European Union held its first hearing on generative AI and copyright in a case brought by the Hungarian media company Like Company against Google Ireland. The dispute addresses whether protected press content can be used and reproduced through a generative system without authorisation or remuneration, and it exposed sharply different views among the parties, member states and the Commission. For regional leaders, the battle is also territorial.
The committee’s broader Culture Compass opinion calls for less fragmented, short-term funding and more accessible multiannual support for smaller cultural actors, including those in rural, border and demographically vulnerable areas. It warns against an increasingly centralised funding model and asks the Commission to assess the territorial effect of future cultural initiatives. That is why the AI clause matters beyond Brussels copyright circles.
If the gains from generative AI flow to the companies able to train and deploy the largest models, while the cost is borne by dispersed creators and smaller institutions, the EU’s promise of a culture policy rooted in every region will look thin. The Commission’s forthcoming AI strategy will show whether the regional warning changes policy or merely joins the growing archive of European concern.