Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg (born 1967) led the Liberal Democrats and served as UK deputy prime minister in the 2010–2015 coalition before losing his seat and reinventing himself in Silicon Valley. From 2018 to early 2025 he was Meta’s top policy executive — ultimately President of Global Affairs — where he defended the company’s open-weight Llama strategy and its use of public data for AI training.

The consent fight

In May 2025, promoting his book “How to Save the Internet” as the UK debated its text-and-data-mining copyright reforms, Clegg told an audience that while creators should be able to opt out of AI training, requiring consent up front was implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data — and that if Britain imposed such a rule alone, it would kill its AI industry overnight. The remarks landed in the middle of a campaign by Elton John, Paul McCartney and hundreds of musicians demanding exactly that consent, and made Clegg a lightning rod for the creative industries.

Clegg’s position is more layered than the headline: he has endorsed opt-outs, transparency, and paying for licensed content where feasible, and his book frets about internet fragmentation more than it cheerleads for AI. But on the core question of whether the machine-learning economy may ingest the open web by default, he has consistently sided with the builders — a straight line from his Meta brief to his public advocacy.