CC Signals

A proposal from Creative Commons for expressing licensing and usage preferences for AI systems. It builds on existing Creative Commons licensing infrastructure and focuses specifically on copyright questions: can AI systems train on this content? Under what license terms? Can the output be used commercially?

Why it matters for writers: CC Signals addresses a fundamentally different layer than llms.txt or robots.txt. It's not about discoverability or access; it's about rights. The question "can AI train on my content?" is legally and philosophically distinct from "can AI access my content at inference time?" CC Signals attempts to make that distinction machine-readable. Whether machines, or their operators, will respect the distinction is a separate, less technical, and considerably more fraught question.

Related terms: Content Signals · IETF aipref · robots.txt