NYT, Economist Join Publisher Push to Control AI Use
The SPUR coalition now has more than 80 members seeking common rules for tracking, licensing and paying for journalism used by AI systems.
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The New York Times, The Economist and Agence France-Presse have joined a publisher coalition seeking greater control over how artificial intelligence companies use and profit from journalism.
The Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, or SPUR, coalition now has more than 80 members across more than 20 countries. New members also include The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, while the BBC, Financial Times and Associated Press are founding members.
SPUR is developing technical and commercial standards to help publishers track how AI systems use their material and enforce licensing terms. It says publishers should control whether their work is used for AI training, fine-tuning or generating responses.
“Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist,” Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, The New York Times’ head of strategic partnerships and chief of staff, said in a statement reported by Reuters.
The expansion comes as disputes between publishers and AI companies increasingly move into the courts.
Earlier this month, USA Today and several affiliated newspapers sued OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement.
OpenAI and Microsoft also face copyright claims from authors and news organizations, including The New York Times.
Publishers are also grappling with falling search traffic as Google adds more AI-generated answers.
Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 sites fell 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025, according to Chartbeat data published by the Reuters Institute.
The institute said it was unclear how much of the decline was caused by AI-generated search features.
SPUR has also released an open-source Content Telemetry Standard designed to record when publisher content is retrieved, used to support an AI response, cited, displayed or engaged with.
The system is intended to give publishers a common record of how their material is used, providing data for licensing negotiations and monitoring compliance with agreed terms.
