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Anna joined CC in 2019 as Director of Product. She was promoted to COO in 2021 and was appointed CEO in 2024.
Before joining CC, Anna spent a decade building out all aspects of the operations of three distributed performance marketing start-ups. She is constantly considering opportunities for expansion and improvement in the environment around her. She happily straddles the worlds of leadership, operations, and product.
Anna grew up in Iceland, Scotland, and Malawi, leaving home to study in Norway, the United States, South Africa, and back to Iceland. She now calls Austin, Texas her home, and settles for traveling instead of moving (for the time being). Sharing information and resources is central to how Anna operates, as she is convinced it leads to a better existence for everyone. Sharing ice cream is optional, but encouraged.
Image attribution: CC staff photos are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Gratitude to Sara Jordan Photography.
Creative Commons has been exploring questions around artificial intelligence for a long time: how this profound technological shift might affect people’s motivations to share, whether the intentions behind sharing work before AI became mainstream still hold when we consider how those works are being used now, and how we sustain a thriving commons when the fundamental bargain of the open web has shifted.
In this post, we outline our plans to build upon and strengthen CC signals in order to support our goal of sustained access to human knowledge. We do not have all the answers yet. What we do have is a framework for how we will work toward them.
Last month, we published a preview of what we intended to bring to the AI Impact Summit in Delhi: a focus on data governance, shared infrastructure, and democratic approaches to AI that genuinely advance the public interest rather than replicate existing power imbalances. That piece outlined our core interventions and the principles that have guided our thinking as we grapple with how to ensure openness, agency, and equity in the age of AI.
Over the past year, we’ve been engaged in a series of conversations with a small group of researchers specializing in IP, AI policy, and data governance about what CC licensing means—and does—in African contexts today. What started as an organic exchange in various spaces has revealed something larger: a strong appetite to move these conversations into the open. At stake are not only questions about CC licenses but deeper issues of data sovereignty, equity, governance, and power in global knowledge systems.
This month, CC will be represented at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, an international gathering shaping the future of AI policy and practice. The 2026 Summit follows the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, where CC underscored a simple but essential truth: without civil society, there can be no public interest.