Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page (born 1944 in Heston, England) was the most in-demand session guitarist in 1960s London before founding Led Zeppelin in 1968, producing every one of the band’s albums and writing the riffs — “Whole Lotta Love,” “Kashmir,” “Stairway to Heaven” — that became hard rock’s foundational texts. Famously guarded about Zeppelin’s catalog, he has spent decades policing how the band’s music is used.

The session man’s standard

In March 2025, as the UK government floated letting AI companies train on copyrighted works unless rights-holders opted out, Page posted a long statement on Instagram condemning the plan. The proposed opt-out, he wrote, “is a sham,” because “it is technically impossible for artists to opt out” — making the scheme “not regulation” but “a free pass for AI to exploit creativity without consequence.”

His most quoted argument reached back to his years as a hired gun: if someone had lifted his riffs without credit or payment in his session days, it would have been called theft, and the same standard must apply to AI. The intervention placed him alongside Paul McCartney, Elton John and hundreds of other British musicians who fought the proposal through 2025.

Page’s objection is aimed at unlicensed scraping rather than the technology itself — his statement centered on consent, attribution and compensation, the three things he says AI training currently skips.