European Writers’ Council

The European Writers’ Council (EWC), founded in 1977 in Berlin as the European Writers’ Congress, is a Brussels-based federation of more than 50 national writers’ and literary translators’ associations across some 34 countries, representing well over 200,000 professional authors. Long a fixture of EU copyright policy, it became one of the most persistent institutional critics of generative AI in Europe.

The AI Act campaign

From 2023 through 2024, as the EU AI Act was negotiated, the EWC issued a drumbeat of statements and joint letters — often alongside performers’, journalists’, and composers’ federations — demanding that AI developers disclose their training data, obtain consent, and remunerate authors. A July 2024 joint statement to Ursula von der Leyen and the new European Parliament declared that every generative model in existence had been trained “in full opacity” on copyrighted work, without authorization or payment. The campaign was driven in large part by novelist Nina George, EWC president from 2019 to 2023 and since then its Commissioner for Political Affairs.

The Council has kept up the pressure since the Act passed: in July 2025 it joined 40 organizations condemning the EU’s General-Purpose AI Code of Practice and training-data disclosure template as “a betrayal of the EU AI Act’s objectives,” arguing the rules let AI companies satisfy transparency obligations without revealing which works they actually used. It also opposes the text-and-data-mining exception that lets models train on protected works unless authors opt out — a mechanism the EWC says is technically meaningless for books already scraped.