Anna Tumadóttir

Anna Tumadóttir
Tumadóttir at the WikiPortraits studio at SXSW in 2025
Residence	Austin, Texas, United States
Occupation	Nonprofit executive
Company	Creative Commons
Title	Chief Executive Officer of Creative Commons (2024 to present)

Anna Tumadóttir is a nonprofit executive who has been the chief executive officer of Creative Commons (CC), the organization that stewards the Creative Commons copyright licenses and public domain tools, since April 10, 2024. She grew up in Iceland, Scotland and Malawi, studied in Norway, the United States, South Africa and Iceland, and spent about a decade running operations at three distributed performance marketing start-ups before joining Creative Commons in September 2019 as Director of Product.

At Creative Commons, Tumadóttir first led product strategy for CC Search, the organization's search engine for openly licensed images, working alongside the then Director of Engineering, Kriti Godey. After CC Search was transferred to WordPress and relaunched as Openverse in 2021, she became chief operating officer, and in 2023 she also held the title of Deputy CEO. When Catherine Stihler announced the end of her tenure as chief executive on December 29, 2023, the board named Tumadóttir interim CEO, and on April 10, 2024 it appointed her to the post permanently, a decision the board chair described as unanimous.

Her tenure as chief executive has been shaped by the question of how openly licensed material should be treated when it is used to train artificial intelligence systems. She led a strategy refresh that produced the organization's 2025 to 2028 strategic plan, and under her the organization launched CC signals, a framework intended to let holders of datasets state how their material may be reused by machines. She has represented Creative Commons at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 and the AI Impact Summit in Delhi in February 2026, and has written that "without civil society, there can be no public interest."

As of October 2026, Tumadóttir is listed as chief executive on the Creative Commons team page and continues to publish under that title on the organization's blog. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Early life and education

Tumadóttir grew up in three countries: Iceland, Scotland and Malawi. She left home to study in Norway, then continued her studies in the United States and South Africa before returning to Iceland. Her Creative Commons biography does not name the institutions she attended or the degrees she earned, and no published source consulted for this article gives her date or place of birth.

In a 2024 letter introducing herself to the Creative Commons community, she wrote that her background and education had "spanned multiple continents and very different spaces (non-profit, start-ups, higher education)", and that a consistent theme ran through them: "How do we remove barriers? How do we make things work better?"

Career

Performance marketing start-ups

Before she joined Creative Commons, Tumadóttir spent about ten years "building out all aspects of the operations" of three distributed performance marketing start-ups, according to her staff biography. The biography describes her as someone who "happily straddles the worlds of leadership, operations, and product." The companies are not named in Creative Commons' published material.

Director of Product at Creative Commons (2019 to 2021)

The organization announced on September 12, 2019 that Tumadóttir had joined that week as Director of Product, as part of an expansion of its technology team that also brought in a core systems manager, a web developer and a front-end engineer over the preceding year. She later wrote that she had partnered with Kriti Godey, then Director of Engineering, to lead the organization's work on CC Search.

CC Search had left beta on April 30, 2019. In a post co-written with Victoria Heath to mark its first anniversary, Tumadóttir reported that the tool had been used by more than 2.8 million people in 230 countries and territories during its first year, and that "dog" and "cat" were its two most common queries. A second post in July 2020 set out the product team's user research. It grouped users into educators and students, each about 30 percent of users, and creators, illustrators and professionals, each about 10 percent. It reported that 40 percent of traffic came from the United States and that more than 65 percent of users searched in English, and it said the team planned to internationalize the service and add audio content.

In late 2019 the product team acted as a "client" for a four-week project by graduate students in a Product Design Studio course at the University of California, Berkeley. Tumadóttir wrote that the students had produced a user research report of nearly 40 pages and several interactive prototypes, and that the work had "jump-started an overhaul of the CC Search user interface."

During this period Tumadóttir also co-wrote, with Eric Steuer, the organization's announcement of the first public call for proposals from Grant for the Web, a US$100 million initiative by Coil, Creative Commons and Mozilla to fund projects built on the Web Monetization standard, under which at least half of grant money was to go to openly licensed projects. With Julia Brungs she co-authored a February 2021 summary of research into the Creative Commons Global Network, the organization's network of national chapters and individual members. The research had been scoped in April 2019 and carried out through a survey and interviews between December 2019 and February 2020.

In 2021 Tumadóttir hosted an episode of the organization's Open Minds podcast with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and chief executive of Automattic. That year the organization announced that CC Search would move to WordPress, and several former members of the CC technology team joined WordPress to run it. On December 13, 2021, Tumadóttir announced that CC Search users would from that day be redirected to Openverse at WordPress, which kept the same collections and filters and launched with 10 languages fully translated. She has described the handover as the point at which she moved into the role of chief operating officer.

Chief operating officer and Deputy CEO (2021 to 2023)

The organization states that Tumadóttir was promoted to chief operating officer in 2021 "after her successful time leading product strategy", and that in 2023 she also held the role of Deputy CEO, "ensuring ongoing effective operations and stewardship of organizational priorities." Tumadóttir served under Catherine Stihler, a former Member of the European Parliament who had become chief executive in August 2020. The board later wrote that, like many nonprofits during the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization had "struggled financially" in that period and recovered under Stihler, helped by a 20th Anniversary Campaign that ended in December 2022 and brought in multi-year funding commitments.

As chief operating officer, Tumadóttir worked on what the organization called the "Better Internet" effort, a set of conversations with other digital rights and public interest technology groups. In November 2021 she introduced a blog series reporting on workshops held at that year's CC Global Summit on misinformation, access to knowledge, platform power, open standards and last-mile internet access. She wrote that the groups were "imagining a multi-stakeholder public interest technology alliance." In 2022 Tumadóttir and Stihler attended DWeb Camp, a gathering on the decentralized web, where CC ran a workshop with Public Knowledge. In her account of the event she questioned the claim that the next version of the web would be about ownership, arguing that future iterations "should actually be less about ownership and more about sharing." Also in 2022 she interviewed Sam Williams, co-founder and chief executive of Arweave, for the Open Minds podcast.

In January 2023 Tumadóttir and Brigitte Vézina, then Director of Policy and Open Culture, attended the public program around the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Tumadóttir wrote that CC was "not (yet) a formal member of the forum" and that generative AI was "raising thorny questions around creators, users, copyright, and remuneration."

Interim chief executive (December 2023 to April 2024)

On December 29, 2023, CC board chair Delia Browne announced that Stihler was concluding her time leading the organization after more than three years, and that Tumadóttir would serve as interim CEO during the transition. The trade publication Creative Industries News reported that she would hold the interim post while the board searched for a new chief executive.

In a March 1, 2024 letter written as interim CEO, Tumadóttir set out her priorities. She named four programs begun in the previous three years: the Open Culture program for galleries, libraries, archives and museums, funded by Arcadia; the Open Climate Campaign, run with SPARC and EIFL; the Open Climate Data project, funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation; and a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative project on openly licensed preprints in the life sciences. Tumadóttir also flagged generative AI and what she called the "care and feeding" of the legal infrastructure behind the licenses, including translations, in-house legal expertise, technology maintenance, training and support for the CC Global Network, with emphasis on the Global South. She announced the Open Infrastructure Circle, a program of recurring donors to fund that core work.

Chief executive officer (2024 to present)

The board of directors appointed Tumadóttir chief executive on April 10, 2024, with immediate effect. Browne said that "the CC Board universally supported Anna's appointment as CEO" and described her as "a source of stability as well as a catalyst for CC's future direction". The announcement said her first task would be a strategic refresh of the organization. Browne, who had been chair since late 2022, later counted overseeing "a CEO transition in early 2024" among her contributions to the board.

Strategy refresh

In May 2024 Tumadóttir announced that, rather than continue with the 2021 to 2025 strategy written in 2020, CC would conduct a strategy refresh. She wrote that the earlier plan's "predictions and plans set forth in 2020 are not as helpful in the reality of 2024", and that the aim was "returning to the core of CC, as a movement, as a community, and as legal and technical infrastructure." According to the organization's 2024 annual report, the process drew nearly 300 survey responses and eight virtual consultations, and the board approved the new 2025 to 2028 strategy in October 2024.

The plan was published on January 22, 2025, with three goals: to "strengthen the open infrastructure of sharing", to "defend and advocate for a thriving creative commons" and to "center community". In the launch post Tumadóttir called the organization's work "an essential service" requiring "sustained and predictable long-term funding", and asked those who benefited from the licenses to support it as "an act of reciprocity." In March 2025 Tumadóttir named two focus areas for that year: data governance, and "sustaining open licensing in the age of AI". She said both rested on the principle that "ideas and facts should not be commodified" and on resisting "the reflex to expand copyright."

Artificial intelligence and CC signals

In July 2024 Tumadóttir published a paper of questions on AI and the commons that introduced "preference signals", the idea that a creator or rightsholder could indicate how their work may be used to train AI models. She argued that the debate had been "fairly binary, offering only all-or-nothing choices" and that a way for creators to say "no, unless..." would be good for the commons. Tumadóttir cited consultations showing that people wanted more choice over how their work was used and that, without it, some might not share at all.

In April 2025 she wrote that it was "high time for Creative Commons (CC) to be louder about our values", that "neutrality serves only the status quo", and that commercial foundation model development "lack[s] reciprocity". Tumadóttir listed forms that reciprocity from AI developers could take, including attribution, support for open infrastructure, cooperative dataset building and releasing model weights into the commons. In March 2025 CC and the Wikimedia Foundation held an "Open House for an Open Future" during South by Southwest in Austin, where speakers included Audrey Tang and Cory Doctorow, and a panel discussed preference signals. The event was sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The organization publicly launched the CC signals project on June 25, 2025, describing it as a framework that would let dataset holders signal how their content could be reused by machines, with tools ranging from legally binding to normative. Tumadóttir said: "CC signals are designed to sustain the commons in the age of AI. Just as the CC licenses helped build the open web, we believe CC signals will help shape an open AI ecosystem grounded in reciprocity." The organization planned an alpha release for November 2025. TechCrunch reported the launch as an attempt to balance the open internet against demand for AI training data, set alongside other responses such as Reddit's use of robots.txt and Cloudflare's plans to charge AI crawlers. The 2025 annual report said the launch webinar drew more than 400 attendees from 40 countries and that three town halls reached a further 300 people. It said the feedback was divided between those wanting enforceable controls, those wanting to express preferences, and those wanting AI training with as few restrictions as possible.

In December 2025 Tumadóttir announced that CC had worked with the RSL Collective, ahead of the release of the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) 1.0 standard for machine-readable content licensing terms, to add a "contribution" component to the standard. Tumadóttir acknowledged that the organization and pay-to-crawl systems were "strange bedfellows", but argued that well-designed systems "may help curb extractive behavior by powerful actors while keeping the web open for everyone else."

The approach changed during 2026. In May 2026 Tumadóttir and general counsel Sarah Hinchliff Pearson described a shift "from expressing preferences to rebalancing power". They said attribution, a preference in the first version of CC signals, should become a requirement. They also described proposed additions to the Internet Engineering Task Force's AI Preferences vocabulary, research on a new legal tool for conditional access to collections, and a goal of raising US$5 million to fund the next stage of the project. In September 2026 Tumadóttir gave two reasons for the change. First, the IETF process was seen as moving too slowly. Second, representatives of major AI labs had said in workshops that they "might take anything framed as a 'yes, if...' or 'no, unless...' as a blanket 'no.'" Tumadóttir wrote that copyright alone "cannot provide the balance we need" and that the organization was exploring "approaches beyond copyright", which the May post had called "a real paradigm shift for CC". CC also published updated guidance on using CC licenses in an AI ecosystem on September 3, 2026, for which Tumadóttir is credited with substantial editing contributions.

International AI summits and policy work

CC was an official participant in the AI Action Summit in Paris on February 10 and 11, 2025, and spoke on a panel about international AI governance. In her account, Tumadóttir said the organization had pressed three points: that civil society must be included, that openness in AI matters, and that solutions should fit local contexts. Tumadóttir warned against "a misguided shift from CC BY to CC BY-NC-ND" by creators trying to regain control, and criticized what she called "the false dichotomy of regulation versus innovation" in the political discussion. She also wrote that "philanthropy is not a business model" for public AI infrastructure.

With Rebecca Ross, Tumadóttir represented CC at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi in February 2026, where the organization focused on data governance and data sovereignty, particularly for communities in the Global South. In a post written afterwards they argued that "AI governance must move from principles to infrastructure" and that building infrastructure for the data layer of public interest AI would be "a timely extension" of the organization's mission. In the same month the two published a summary of conversations with African researchers in intellectual property and data governance. They reported concerns that CC BY and CC0 were "sometimes (inadvertently) enabling extractive practices" involving African language datasets and community data, and suggested that CC should be "clearer about where CC licenses work and, just as importantly, where they don't".

In August 2025, during Tumadóttir's tenure, CC became an official NGO partner of UNESCO with consultative status. In October 2025 the Open Heritage Coalition, which CC leads and which by then had 70 member organizations in 25 countries, launched the Open Heritage Statement as a step towards a UNESCO recommendation on open heritage.

25th anniversary year

Tumadóttir opened 2026, the organization's 25th anniversary year, with a post giving the year's motto as "If nothing else, credit." Tumadóttir wrote that CC would "engage deeply in defining attribution in the context of AI", consider whether new licenses or new versions of existing licenses were needed, and hold public conversations with "experts, advocates, and dissenters". At Wikimania 2026 she joined a panel on the effects of AI crawling on human creativity with representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, Cambridge University Press and Open Future. On September 21, 2026, CC and the NYU Engelberg Center held a day-long convening on openness and digital sovereignty, funded by the Siegel Family Endowment. Tumadóttir described it as part of the "Road to Geneva", ahead of an AI summit in Geneva planned for June 2027, and argued that "openness alone is not a sovereignty strategy."

Leadership and management style

Tumadóttir's public statements stress operations and the removal of friction. Her staff biography says she "is constantly considering opportunities for expansion and improvement in the environment around her", and in her first letter as interim chief executive she framed her career around the questions "How do we remove barriers? How do we make things work better?" On her appointment the board cited her "commitment to removing barriers, improving workflows and effectiveness, and sharing openly".

Tumadóttir has described CC as a small organization. In December 2025 she referred to "our small but determined team of 20" working against "multibillion-dollar companies", and said that the organization could move on CC signals only "at the pace our funding allows." Tumadóttir has repeatedly said that CC should test and revise its AI work rather than settle on a fixed answer. In January 2026 she wrote that "CC signals and any other AI intervention must be approached with an R&D mindset", and that "the commons moves at human pace and human work is messy. This is a feature, not a flaw." In September 2026 she described the organization as "guided by the messy middle, trying to find common ground and balanced solutions in a world of either/or."

Her writing also shows a shift towards a more openly argued position. In April 2025 she wrote that "there is nothing neutral about fighting for a more equitable world through open practices and sharing knowledge." She has also invited dissent: the 2026 anniversary program was to include "dissenters (yes!)", and the African data governance post asked what role CC could play in "holding space, convening dissent, and legitimizing plural approaches to openness".

Major strategic decisions

• Strategy refresh (2024). Tumadóttir chose to end the 2021 to 2025 strategy early and replace it with a refreshed 2025 to 2028 plan, approved by the board in October 2024 and published in January 2025.
• Legal team changes (2024). In August 2024, presenting it as part of a "renewed commitment to investing in the core open infrastructure", she announced that Sarah Hinchliff Pearson would return as general counsel after a period at DuckDuckGo, and that the previous general counsel, Kat Walsh, would become copyright and licensing counsel.
• License infrastructure. The 2024 annual report records that the organization replaced its legacy license-serving application, ccEngine, with a new CC Legal Tools application managing the 30,000 documents behind its six licenses and the CC0 tool, and redesigned its website. The report attributes this work to support from the Open Infrastructure Circle. In 2025 it released a new version of its license Chooser tool.
• CC signals (2025 to 2026). The decision to build a preference signals framework, and then in 2026 to move towards legally enforceable conditional access tools beyond copyright, is described above.
• Programme funding transitions. In December 2025 she said the climate data project, funded for three years by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, would wind down at the end of 2025 without new support, while the preprints work would continue with support from the Gates Foundation. In January 2026 she said Arcadia's funding for the open culture work, which had run for almost five years, would end later in 2026, and that the organization was seeking new grants.

Financial and market performance

CC is a nonprofit and has no share price or market capitalization. Its annual reports give the following summary figures for Tumadóttir's first two years as chief executive:

Year	Total income	Total expenses	Source
2024	US$5,131,012	US$3,871,933
2025	US$4,955,120	US$4,677,203

In 2024 foundations provided US$4,163,843 of income, a figure the report says includes cash from multi-year gifts. Corporate sponsors gave US$276,500, and the organization received contributions from 20 foundations and companies and more than 850 individual donors. In 2025 foundation income was US$3,972,914 and corporate sponsorship US$325,000. Spending on operations was US$2,263,294 in 2025, against US$1,351,579 in 2024.

For context, the organization's Form 990 filings, as summarised by ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, show total revenue of US$9,853,619 in 2021, US$7,655,908 in 2022 and US$4,891,109 in 2023, the years in which Tumadóttir was chief operating officer. Tumadóttir has said that funding is a limit on the organization's work, writing in the 2025 strategy that "the extent to which we meet our strategic goals and realize our strategic outcomes will be directly correlated with the funding we are able to secure."

The organization's CC Certificate training program had certified 1,890 graduates in 68 countries by the end of 2024 and 2,311 graduates in 73 countries by the end of 2025.

Board memberships and outside roles

As chief executive, Tumadóttir works with the CC board of directors. In October 2024 the board elected Angela Oduor Lungati, executive director of Ushahidi, as its chair for a two-year term, replacing Browne. Tumadóttir co-signed the announcement, which described Oduor Lungati as the first board chair from Kenya. No outside directorships held by Tumadóttir are recorded in the sources consulted.

Tumadóttir has also appeared as a speaker for CC, including at the AI Action Summit in Paris, the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, South by Southwest and Wikimania.

Personal life

Tumadóttir lives in Austin, Texas. Her biography says she "settles for traveling instead of moving (for the time being)", and that "sharing information and resources is central to how Anna operates, as she is convinced it leads to a better existence for everyone." It adds that "sharing ice cream is optional, but encouraged." Tumadóttir has written that working at CC is a privilege because "the organizational mission so deeply aligns with my own belief system." In a September 2026 post Tumadóttir mentioned having read Cory Doctorow's book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

A portrait of her was taken at the WikiPortraits studio at South by Southwest in 2025 and released under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license; CC used one of the images in its 2025 annual report.

See also

• Creative Commons
• Catherine Stihler
• Lawrence Lessig
• Wikimedia Foundation

External links

• Creative Commons official website
• Anna Tumadóttir, staff biography at Creative Commons