Adobe Presses Regulators Worldwide for New AI Creator Rights

Adobe is lobbying governments across multiple countries to close gaps in creator rights, with chief legal officer Louise Pentland calling on 11 November 2026 for protection against commercial AI imitation of artists' styles and for safeguards covering the licensing and use of creative work. The campaign, which spans the United States and other jurisdictions, marks one of the most sustained regulatory pushes by a major software vendor on behalf of individual creators whose work trains and competes with generative AI systems.

The stakes are straightforward. Generative models can now reproduce visual styles at commercial scale, while existing copyright law in most countries protects specific works rather than the stylistic signatures of the artists who made them. Adobe, whose Firefly image-generation tools sit directly in that market, is arguing that without new legal rights and provenance technology, creators will stop producing the material that future AI models need.

What is Adobe asking lawmakers to do?

Pentland, who leads Adobe's legal operation, said the company has mapped creator-rights regimes country by country and is advocating where protection falls short.

"We've gone to different parts of the world to really understand what the creator rights are in those countries, and we've been putting our support behind different creators in different countries where there are gaps," Pentland said. "So, for example, here in the United States, we've been putting our support behind the Creator Act, which was an act designed to allow protections for creators that the copyright laws do not provide."

The centerpiece of Adobe's American push is the CREATOR Act, introduced in the US House of Representatives on 2 June 2026. The bill proposes a federal intellectual property right that sits apart from both copyright and trademark. Under the proposal, visual artists or rights holders would gain control over specified commercial exploitation or public distribution of stylistic impersonations — meaning works generated to mimic an artist's recognizable style without consent.

The draft legislation draws deliberate limits. It would exclude:

• Ideas, genres and artistic movements
• Commonly used visual styles
• Criticism and research uses
• Certain forms of parody

The parody and criticism carve-outs carry conditions. They apply subject to rules concerning commercial exploitation intended to mislead consumers about the source of a work, or about its sponsorship or approval. In practice, that means a stylistic imitation would remain actionable when it is sold in a way that suggests the original artist produced or endorsed it.

How does copyright treat AI-assisted work?

A separate legal question concerns works made with AI assistance rather than works imitated by AI. Here the framework already exists. In its January 2025 report, the US Copyright Office stated that using AI to assist creation does not by itself prevent copyright protection.

The report drew a line between machine output and human authorship. Human-authored expression, creative arrangements and modifications may qualify for protection. Prompts alone, the Office concluded, do not provide sufficient human control over expressive elements to ground a copyright claim. For creators using tools like Adobe's, that distinction determines who owns what comes out of the model.

Why is this a global campaign rather than an American one?

Pentland rejected a one-size-fits-all approach and said Adobe is negotiating jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

"I completely agree; it's a global issue, but every country has its own set of rules, and we don't want to assume that everyone has the same need as the U.S.," Pentland said. "So we're being very methodical, and I'm travelling a lot and I'm going around to all of the different government agencies and having this conversation with them."

She acknowledged that legislative progress will be slow, and she identified the core hesitation regulators face.

"But it's going to take time because, as you probably know, lots of governments are wrestling with: do they regulate? Do they not regulate? They're scared to overregulate and stifle innovation," Pentland said. "So it's a very active conversation that we're having with a lot of regulators around the world."

Adobe is not conducting that lobbying alone. Pentland said the company brings working creators into meetings with officials, a tactic she described as decisive.

"We often bring them with us and bring them into the conversation. And it's super powerful when governments hear from individual creators, hear how their lives are being disrupted by this technology revolution," Pentland said.

What control do creators have over Adobe's own AI models?

The lobbying campaign runs parallel to Adobe's commercial AI strategy, which Pentland framed as giving creators control over which models touch their data.

"Look, the great thing about the way we've made the integration is the customer, the creator, is entirely in control of what models they use," Pentland said. "If you want that sort of commercially safe experience, you'll stay within Firefly. If you want to pull in the models, then you decide what data you give those models. You decide what inputs you want, what prompts you want, and we put you completely in the centre of that control decision."

Pentland added that Adobe does not relay creator data to third-party models when users choose to connect them. "But then that's your decision what you do with your data in that situation. We're not passing that data. You're making that decision within whatever creative project you're on," she said.

The distinction matters commercially. Adobe's Firefly documentation describes its initial commercial model as trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public-domain material whose copyright has expired. Adobe presents that training approach as central to its effort to design Firefly for commercial use, positioning it against rivals whose models were trained on scraped web content now at the center of litigation.

For large customers, Adobe offers Firefly Foundry, a service announced in October 2025 that provides tailored models trained on proprietary branded content. Adobe describes these as private models integrated with products including Creative Cloud and its GenStudio marketing platform.

The most concrete example is Adobe's collaboration with Walt Disney Imagineering, which includes models customised on Imagineering's own assets. Adobe's June 2026 announcement outlined the planned uses:

• Turning sketches into concept art
• Generating franchise-specific creative assets
• Producing 3D prototypes from two-dimensional designs

What are Content Credentials?

Alongside legislation, Adobe is betting on provenance technology as a second line of defense for creators. The company's Content Credentials system attaches machine-readable metadata to creative files, recording how and when a work was created and by whom.

"It's an open-source technology, and it's designed to build the metadata into the creator product. And what that does is it provides the provenance and the data of how and when that was created," Pentland said. "And I think that allows the creator control over what they want in that content credential, and it's a combination of, if you think of it almost like a nutritional label where you can put in a lot of different information, who created it, and then you can over time show if it was ever modified."

The credentials use a specification hosted by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, an external standards body. The system can reveal how content was created and its full editing history, giving buyers, platforms and courts a verifiable record of a file's origin.

Pentland said the technology serves creators with divergent goals. "Some creators are really focused on proliferating their creation; they want to make sure that as many people get to see it and experience it as possible. And others are very intent on making sure that they control exactly where it goes. And things like content credentials allow them to do that," she said.

What happens next?

Pentland argued that technical provenance tools, not regulation alone, will define how creator rights hold up as AI-generated content spreads.

"So I think a lot of the solutions in the future will be technology solutions. It won't just be the technology taking over. The technology can help as well. I think it can provide some of that assurance and that comfort that people can then continue to create," Pentland said. "Because if they don't, then future models of AI will not be effective, and we need them to continue to create."

The CREATOR Act remains in committee in the House, and Adobe's country-by-country lobbying has produced no enacted legislation so far. The June 2026 bill, the January 2025 Copyright Office report and the October 2025 Firefly Foundry launch together frame the argument Adobe will carry into future regulatory talks: new style rights for humans, provenance labels for machines, and a licensing market in between.