In the UK, when a student submits an assignment, they often have no choice: it has to go through Turnitin, software that checks they haven't copied anything. No submission, no grade.
This summer, Turnitin wanted to change its terms of use. Submitted assignments could have been used to "improve or develop AI tools".
The University of Cambridge refused to sign. And it wasn't alone for long.
What happened
In July, Cambridge became the first university to reject Turnitin's new contract. It continues to use the software under the old terms, until July 2027, and is looking for alternatives. The University of Southampton has announced it will not renew its contract after this academic year.
Student unions mobilised. The country's main student union called it scandalous that a mandatory submission platform could change its terms to use students' work.
Faced with the backlash, Turnitin backed down. No changes will be made during the 2026-2027 academic year. The new version of the contract is pushed back to September 2027, and is to be rewritten with the body representing IT services at British universities.
The heart of the problem: impossible consent
A student officer at the University of York put it simply: you can't really consent to your work being used to train an AI, since you're obliged to submit it to be graded.
That's the whole question. Consent is only worth anything if you can say no. Yet a student who refuses to submit their assignment doesn't get their degree.
Turnitin's response
The company says it has never used student papers to train a generative AI, the kind that writes text, and has no intention of doing so. It states that it does not sell any student data to other companies.
But it acknowledges that it may use anonymised assignments to improve its detection and assessment tools. The distinction matters: these tools don't write anything, they classify and assess. They are still AI tools, though, fed with students' work.
Turnitin's current contract, the one Cambridge chose to keep, already grants the company a non-exclusive, free, perpetual, worldwide and irrevocable licence over students' work, to improve the quality of its services. In other words, even before this controversy, submitted assignments did not remain entirely the exclusive property of those who wrote them.
And in France?
Many French institutions use other anti-plagiarism software, such as the French company Compilatio. The question arises in the same way, though: what do their terms of use say about the use of submitted assignments? Students and teachers alike can ask their institution. It's the same reflex we recommended for checking what AI assistants collect about you.
What to take away
The data that feeds AI comes from everywhere: books, articles, artists' images, and now, perhaps, student papers. Each time, the same question comes back: did the people who produced that work really have a say?
Cambridge showed that a refusal was possible. It took just one large institution saying no for the company to back down, for everyone.