A coalition of British media companies, including the Guardian newspaper, has called on industry peers to support a global framework to ensure AI companies are paid for the journalism they use.
The news provider is calling on publishing, broadcasting, media and news leaders to join the newly formed group, which aims to protect “original journalism” and ensure the “long-term sustainability of the industry”.
The coalition, which includes the Guardian, the BBC, the Financial Times, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group (TMG), has been named the Publisher Usage Rights Standard (Spur). We are calling for the establishment of a global licensing framework that gives AI companies access to high-quality journalism for use in products such as chatbots, while ensuring publishers retain control of their content and are paid fairly when used.
Open letter signed by BBC Director General Tim Davie. Anna Bateson, chief executive of the Guardian. David Rose, Sky News Executive Chairman. TMG chief executive Anna Jones. And FT chief executive John Slade has warned that the FT’s industry’s business model is being undermined by AI.
“Across the industry, our reports, archives, and original content have become foundational training materials for AI systems,” they write. “This material is being scrapped, copied and reused without common standards to enable permission or payment, undermining the economic model that supports journalism.”
“By working together across the industry, we can build a system that respects original reporting, protects public trust, and allows both journalism and AI to thrive,” the letter added.
Generative AI models are the term used to describe the technology behind powerful tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and Google’s video generator Veo3, which must be trained on vast amounts of data to generate responses. The main source of this information is the open web. The open web contains vast amounts of data, from content on Wikipedia and YouTube to newspaper articles and online book archives. The creative and publishing industries are demanding that AI companies license their work and pay them for it.
In addition to establishing a licensing regime, the coalition aims to help create technical tools to protect intellectual property, enable transparent use of journalistic content, and develop common industry standards. The FT and Guardian both have content licensing agreements with OpenAI.
