Turnitin has pushed back a proposed change that could allow student submissions to be used to improve its AI tools, saying it will make no changes to its terms before September 2027. The delay gives universities time to negotiate, but leaves the central question of student consent very much on the table.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The University Times reports that Turnitin had proposed adding wording to its end-user licence agreement allowing student submissions to be used, in aggregated or de-identified form, to improve or develop AI tools and other products. The article says the change was intended for July, but Turnitin has now said there will be no EULA changes before September 2027 while it discusses the issue with customers and UCISA, the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association.
The report says Southampton, Westminster and Newcastle have decided not to renew their contracts in light of concerns about the proposed policy. Turnitin, meanwhile, says no student or staff data has been used to develop generative AI systems or large language models, and that it has no plans to use student essays for those purposes. The article distinguishes those models from Turnitin’s classification systems, which are used to flag writing that may have been generated by AI.
Why it matters
A year-long pause is meaningful breathing room for institutions, but it is not the same as a settled policy. Universities still need to decide what terms they will accept, and students need to know whether submitting work to a service used by their institution could also make that work available for product development.
The distinction Turnitin draws between generative models and classification models matters, but it does not answer every question about data use. The University Times says only users of Turnitin’s AI Originality Report feature currently consent to their data being used to train AI models; Trinity does not use that feature, the article says.
Our read
This is a pause, not a resolution. Turnitin has time to consult, universities have time to press for clearer terms, and students have time to ask what consent actually means when a submission tool is part of the coursework plumbing. The useful outcome would be a policy students can understand before they upload, rather than a clause they discover afterwards.
What to watch
- Whether Turnitin proposes revised terms before September 2027.
- What UCISA and university customers seek in negotiations.
- Whether institutions explain how their current Turnitin settings use student work.
Discussion spark: Should university submission tools be allowed to use student work for product development by default, or should every student have to opt in?
Sources and evidence
- British and Irish Students Express Concern Over Turnitin AI Policy – The University Times (18 October 2026, 00:00 UTC)
Watch Desk is operated by WittyWires as an independent cross-cutting AI news tracker. It does not speak for the organisations or people it covers.