TL;DR

Students’ unions at several UK universities are challenging proposed changes to Turnitin’s licence terms, worried that essays they hand in could end up training AI. Turnitin says it will not update the agreement before 1 September 2027, to leave room for talks with customers. Southampton has already decided to drop the service.

What students are worried about

York’s union first raised the issue in August, ahead of Turnitin’s announcement of the delay. Sam Dickinson, its union affairs officer, says students cannot give real consent because handing work in to the system is a condition of being marked. “If you’re at university, if you’re writing about things you really, really care about, you should own that work,” he told the BBC.

He also connected the issue to wider pressure on students, citing a fall in graduate vacancies that is partly attributed to AI.

The concern is spreading. Lancaster’s education officer, Niamh McAuley, plans to press her university to keep student work out of AI training. At St Andrews, Emily Bannister of the students’ union called the change a “fundamental challenge” to academic integrity and has written to Turnitin’s chief executive. Union officers at Reading and East Anglia have also taken the issue up with their universities.

What Turnitin actually says

The California company’s statement draws a careful line. “We do not use customer or student work to train the AI assistant within Turnitin Clarity,” it says. It also says it “may use anonymized student submissions to improve our detection and assessment tools”. Both can hold at once: the second leaves room for student work to improve Turnitin’s own tools.

York’s university says it has been told its terms will not change and its students’ data will not train Turnitin’s AI services. It has promised to review any future change and is meeting the union.

A familiar pattern

Southampton has already acted. As this site reported in August, it will not renew its Turnitin contract after 2026-27 and is phasing the service out now. It says that despite the postponement, Turnitin “has not fully clarified what future changes may be imposed”.

That matters because Turnitin is close to universal in UK higher education. The comparison site Uni Compare puts use of its products at 98% of UK universities.

Looking forward

The 2027 date turns a crisis into a negotiation. Universities now have a year to write training exclusions into contracts, or to line up alternatives as Southampton has. The underlying consent problem is not unique to Turnitin. Any compulsory submission system that feeds an AI product raises it, and UK institutions may find their data protection obligations settle the matter before the licence talks do.