Gössi submitted the motion in December 2024. It requires the Federal Council (FC) to ensure that copyrighted works (such as newspaper articles or picture) are protected when used by AI system providers. It proposes that rights holders must give explicit consent (in the sense of an opt-in) before their copyrighted works can be used to train generative AI systems, and that providers of publicly available AI systems should not be allowed to rely on existing exceptions in the Copyright Act (CopA), e.g., the right to use copyrighted works for purposes of scientific research (Article 24d CopA, Swiss law's text and data mining exception). The motion further stipulates that Swiss law should apply and that Swiss courts should have jurisdiction if products generated by such systems are made available in Switzerland.

The FC recommended adopting the motion. The CS approved it on 20 March 2025, after which the NC’s Committee for Science, Education, and Culture examined it on 5 September 2025. After consulting experts, the committee concluded that the motion would unduly restrict the permissible use of copyrighted works. The committee nevertheless supported the motion’s overall goal – the better protection of intellectual property against "AI misuse." The committee advised that the NC adopt the motion in an amended form. The amended motion requests the FC to implement stronger protection of intellectual property against "AI misuse," while ensuring Switzerland remains competitive in AI research, development, and commercialization (cf. Report of the committee here). Overall, it offers considerably more leeway for specifying a balanced approach in the upcoming legislative process.

The NC discussed the motion on 16 September 2025, endorsed the committee’s assessment, and voted in favor of adoption in the amended form as proposed by the committee by 121 to 66 votes (with eight abstentions) (see the debate's transcript here). The motion will be reassigned to the CS for deliberation on the amended motion. Once the motion has passed, the FC will draft a detailed legislative proposal, with the Intellectual Property Institute already engaging in preparatory works.

From a legal and policy perspective, the initial motion approach was criticized as not only questionable with regard to the CopA's overall systematics but also hard to implement and likely an international outlier. The vast data requirements for training AI models would, indeed, seem to make it very hard to comprehensively identify copyrighted works within this data or to obtain consent from all copyright holders. If enforced as originally drafted, the motion may even pose a hurdle to AI research and development in Switzerland. This is all the more so since there are indications for a more lenient approach in the EU and the US. In its debate, the NC raised similar concerns and called for a practicable way to protect copyrighted works from misuse by AI providers. Alternative approaches could, for instance, include a collective licensing scheme, a statutory license (possibly with opt-out elements), or a more tailored, potentially royalty-bearing (e.g. "AI flat fee") copyright exception. Accordingly, the NC’s debate addressed several elements helpful to such approaches, and to achieving the Motion's overall goal, in particular (granular) machine-readable opt-out standards, transparency and reporting obligations, and effective enforcement measures.

Measures outside the CopA framework are not covered by the motion and were thus not explicitly addressed in the debate. Nevertheless, they should be part of the picture, since training data often include non-copyrighted works – or works whose copyright status is uncertain – such as raw and/or machine data portfolios and – increasingly – synthetic or modelled data.

In the context of the ongoing public and political discourse surrounding AI regulation, it will be imperative to monitor international legal developments, including the further unfolding of US and UK case law, and potential legislative measures in the US or Japan. This is to ensure that the Swiss regulatory framework, while taking content holder interests into consideration, will not impede Switzerland's status as a leading hub for innovation and technological progress.