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Publisher A.G. Sulzberger warns A.I. companies are violating settled law and urges news organizations to stand up for their rights to ensure a sustainable future for reporting.
A.G. spoke today at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, delivering these prepared remarks.
The era of artificial intelligence announced its arrival less than four years ago with the public launch of ChatGPT. Within months, OpenAI’s chatbot collected 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer product in history. Today, it is one of many increasingly powerful A.I. offerings, alongside those of Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and X.
There is little doubt that generative artificial intelligence represents the next major tech revolution, one that brings with it a dizzying array of important questions. Will A.I. spur a surge of productivity? Eliminate entire categories of jobs? Will A.I. unlock amazing medical breakthroughs? Facilitate a biological attack? Can the actions of A.I. models and agents be fully understood? Can they be controlled?
I’m here today to talk about questions that are, admittedly, somewhat narrower. But they matter a great deal to me, and to you and to society.
How will A.I. change the news? How will those changes affect the information ecosystem that serves as the public square for engaged citizens worldwide? And what can the people in this room do to ensure the future of first-hand, fact-based reporting that’s essential to the health of our democracies?
The early signs offer reasons for us to be concerned.
The companies driving A.I., already among the richest and most powerful in human history, are consolidating their outsize control over our data and our attention. At the same time, they are failing to embrace a core responsibility that comes with this power — to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information.
Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their A.I. products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.
As a result, I fear we are careening toward a future with fewer and fewer journalists to do the expensive, difficult work of original reporting — going to places, talking to people, digging up information, covering important issues and events, providing context and analysis, investigating the powerful. A future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy — the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism — continues to dry up.
This potential damage extends far beyond news. A.I. companies have raided civilization’s entire corpus of original works, an act that also poses a danger to the future of books, movies, music, research and an array of other fields. In the United States, these industries represent not just the heart of American cultural and intellectual life, but a pillar of its economy and one of its most powerful exports. Globally, creative professions employ over 50 million people worldwide who produce roughly $12 trillion of economic value a year.
The people gathered today lead news organizations from more than 60 countries. That means you have already fought through the gauntlet of pressures that have battered journalism everywhere, from disappearing revenues to technological intermediation to mounting attacks on press freedom. But on A.I., we must do more. Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the A.I. revolution.
We cannot allow A.I. cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for original journalism. We cannot watch as A.I. companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create. We cannot sit by as this work is used to build replacement products that undermine our ability to earn the audience and revenue necessary to continue reporting the news.
Some tech leaders will portray my comments today as anti-AI. As defending the old status quo. As yet another ossified institution lashing out at the innovators who are driving the forward march of progress. And to be fair to our colleagues in Silicon Valley, there is a tradition of legacy incumbents — say a 175-year-old newspaper — complaining about new technologies and the disrupters behind them.
So it’s worth stating this plainly: The news organization I lead, The New York Times, has a long record of embracing technology to advance the mission of independent journalism. We have a history of respectful partnerships with tech companies to bring that journalism to new readers in new ways. Meeting disruptions with curiosity, openness and adaptability helped us navigate the collapse of our print business and come out stronger on the other side. Today my colleagues are using A.I. technology – responsibly, ethically, and with humans making the decisions – to improve how we report, edit, distribute and monetize our journalism. Holding a powerful new technology at arms length is a recipe for failure.
And I fully believe A.I. has the power to do a great deal of good in the world. I’m not calling A.I. — or the tech giants that control this technology — inherently bad or evil. I’m warning that A.I. companies are making choices that violate settled law, threaten the viability of creative work and appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm.
News organizations should want the good A.I. can bring. But tech companies should also want to support the healthy, sustainable flow of the information and ideas and creativity that powers A.I. — to ensure their actions don’t lead us to a tragedy of the civic commons.
A.I. models are made with four basic ingredients.
The first is talent — the people who design the algorithms. The second is what tech companies call “compute.” That’s the infrastructure behind A.I., like chips and data centers. The third is energy, the electricity required to fuel these power-hungry products. The fourth is what tech companies call “data.” The word itself seems almost designed to make creative and expressive work sound trivial, a ubiquitous commodity. But “data” is often used, among other things, as a synonym for books, movies, music and journalism — what might more accurately be called “copyrighted content.”
Talent, compute, energy and data are all essential to the success of A.I. and, therefore, to the success of the tech giants.
The first three are paid for because — of course they are. No tech C.E.O. would dare suggest forcing the most talented engineers to work for free. To the contrary, they regularly offer pay packages worth tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars. Nor would they consider stealing chips from a Nvidia factory or illegally tapping a power line. Investors consider the potential financial rewards of A.I. to be so great that they are embracing losses that run into the hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers and power plants.
In contrast, A.I. companies take “data” without consent or compensation. Their explanations for the theft keep shifting. They say innovation requires it. They insist they’re just taking facts, which no one can own. They complain that deals take too long and cost too much. They claim the “fair use” doctrine allows them to take content for free anyway. Sometimes they even invoke national security — they warn that if A.I. companies are forced to pay, America will lose the technology race to China.
None of these arguments withstand scrutiny. A chatbot can only spit out “facts” because it illegally copied entire news articles, which enables it to borrow just as liberally from protected language and style as well. Building data centers and power plants is far more expensive and time consuming than hiring lawyers to draft licensing deals with news organizations. Fair use doesn’t allow this kind of harmful, substitutive copying, retention and regurgitation of a single work, let alone everything humanity has ever produced. In its competition with China, America weakens itself by abandoning the intellectual property protections that fuel innovation and power America’s creative enterprises.
The combined valuation of the six leading A.I. companies is $11 trillion — more than three times the G.D.P. of France. Private A.I. investment in the United States reached nearly $350 billion in 2025 and is accelerating in 2026. So the theft of intellectual property is certainly not occurring for want of money to pay for it. Though publisher licensing deals are not public, given the small size of deals that have been reported, it appears that less than half of 1 percent of that investment is going to compensate the people and companies creating the data that powers AI.
Though there are many sources of data, A.I. executives themselves have recognized that original, high-quality content is particularly valuable for the effectiveness and reliability of the technology. Five of the top 10 sites used to train some of the most popular large-language models belong to news publishers. OpenA.I. confessed that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading A.I. models without using copyrighted materials.” One of the company’s engineers wrote that the success of models is “not determined by architecture, hyperparameters, or optimizer choices. It’s determined by your data set, nothing else.” In other words, you are what you eat.
Let’s zoom in on the experience of The New York Times to see how this works.
If you want comprehensive and accurate answers in your A.I. chatbot, it’s hard to think of a better source of data than a news organization that has for 175 years employed experienced, well-paid professional journalists to unearth new information, chronicle unfolding events and assess developments in politics, business, culture, sports, science and global affairs. This original work is valuable to tech companies in large part because it’s been carefully written and edited, independently verified, held to the highest standards for fairness and accuracy, and brought to life in a distinctive, compelling way.
Last year alone, The New York Times published nearly half a million such works, from articles to photos to videos to podcasts, at a cost of over 2 billion dollars. We put journalists on the ground in all 50 American states and in 155 countries, and those journalists more than occasionally experience life-threatening danger. In Ukraine, for example, we had more than 70 journalists and support staff on the ground. All of that was just in 2025. Stretch those contributions across 175 years and 20 million original works and you’ll get a fuller picture of what our newsroom has contributed to the public’s understanding of the world.
The distinctive value of Times journalism — as with other sources of quality journalism — has been repeatedly reaffirmed by the fondness that A.I. companies have for it. Although most A.I. companies conceal their training sources, The Times was the single-largest source of proprietary data in a major dataset used to train many different models, followed by a number of other news organizations, like The Guardian and The Los Angeles Times. A.I. companies regard pulling information from quality news organizations as one of the surest signs that their products are working correctly. As a Microsoft vice president said, “Premium content meaningfully improves response quality.”
Yet the tech giants have argued consistently that they should not be expected to ask permission to use — let alone pay for — this kind of intellectual property. Their argument, as their actions show, has been that they’re entitled to it. Meta trained its model on an infamous database of illegally pirated books. Perplexity openly defied the longstanding norm that websites can’t be scraped surreptitiously in defiance of their explicit objections. OpenA.I. has lobbied the American government to give it legal immunity from its seizures of other people’s work. Even Anthropic, often held up for its commitment to ethical A.I. development, has been unwilling to pay for the high-quality journalism it uses in its products.
Actions like these are why The Times took OpenA.I., its partner, Microsoft, and later Perplexity, to court, for brazen violations of our intellectual property rights protected by U.S. copyright law both in the training of their models and the ongoing use of our work in their products. As with other news organizations who have filed similar lawsuits, we believe these violations threaten the long-term ability of news organizations to continue finding and providing original, trustworthy journalism that the public — and, it turns out, the A.I. models themselves — depend on. But lawsuits are slow and expensive — ours has already stretched two-and-a-half years and cost over 20 million dollars. As A.I. companies are doubtless aware, most news organizations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights.
Even before the arrival of A.I., the global news industry was struggling to survive the waves of change unleashed by the internet, the smartphone and social media.
Over the last two decades, the United States has, by some estimates, lost 75 percent of its journalists and more than 3,000 newspapers. Another newspaper shutters every three days. Digital news outlets have not filled a fraction of that void. Vast swaths of America now lack a single reporter asking questions at city hall, covering local schools and connecting their community with a shared fact base. And when you look at the most expensive and challenging forms of reporting — investigating misconduct or going to the front lines of conflicts — you’ll find that the number of journalists doing this work has fallen more dramatically.
The A.I. disruption is poised to be even more damaging. Until A.I. arrived, there had been a real — if skewed — value exchange between tech platforms and digital content creators like news organizations. This was the compact of the so-called open web. Tech companies — namely the search and social platforms — would take an increasing share of the ad dollars that used to go to news organizations, but deliver a much larger audience in return.
In the next phase of disruption, tech companies, by taking the journalism itself, are taking a growing share of the audience for it, too.
Consider Google. The goal of search engines had long been to identify the most helpful sites, then send people to them. People would go to Google, search a topic, then click a link to sites like the Financial Times, Le Monde or El País to read the story. Google took the vast majority of advertising dollars. But it also sent significant traffic to news organizations through links, allowing publishers to make money by showing ads or selling subscriptions.
In the A.I. era, Google increasingly uses the content of news organizations and other websites to answer questions directly. As a result, getting a Google user to click a link, according to industry research, is 10 times harder today than it was a decade ago. Nevertheless, Google still sets the high-water mark for sending readers to publishers and we can only hope that commitment will continue. Competing A.I. models send referral traffic at a rate that is 96 percent lower than Google search, according to one study.
The tech giants are fully aware of the implications of this shift on the already fragile business models of news organizations. As Microsoft’s head of A.I. monetization wrote: “The open web was built on an implicit value exchange where publishers made content accessible, and distribution channels — like search — helped people find it. That model does not translate cleanly to an AI-first world.” He added: “Publishers need sustainable, transparent ways to govern how their premium content is used.” A worthy sentiment. But look at a recent launch page of Microsoft’s own AI-powered search engine and you’ll find a different posture: “Hi from Bing! Instead of clicking through links, we can talk through whatever you’re curious about.”
This dynamic has, of course, led traffic to news websites to plummet. The largest newspapers tracked by Comscore saw drops of more than 45 percent, on average, as the A.I. race intensified over the last four years. Global news publishers surveyed by the Reuters Institute are bracing for significant traffic declines to continue in the years ahead.
Less traffic to publishers most likely means lost opportunities for advertising, which remains an important revenue stream for most news organizations. Over the last two decades, the combined amount newspapers earned from advertising has already dropped by 80 percent. Meta alone now makes eight times more in ad revenue than every newspaper on earth combined.
To offset advertising declines, many news organizations turned to subscription models. But to the extent people recognize they can access stolen work for free through A.I. products, it will be challenging for news organizations to develop and deepen relationships with potential subscribers. This theft isn’t just happening because publishers are leaving their toys out on the lawn; it’s happening when they are locked up safely in the house. A study found that about 30 percent of A.I. bot scrapes violate explicit restrictions on accessing and taking websites’ content, including content protected behind paywalls.
The revenue stream some are hoping will offset these declines is money from the A.I. companies themselves, through content licensing or micropayments. A number of larger news organizations, including The Times, have signed licensing deals. Others have embraced micropayments from A.I. companies for each individual scrape and use of journalism. But there is good reason to question whether either will be sufficient to make up for the revenue and readers lost to competitive A.I. products. Meanwhile many smaller news organizations whose work has also been taken and used by A.I. models haven’t been offered any such compensation, and the vast majority of news publishers say they expect no significant income from A.I. platforms.
Troublingly, even as these tech companies have tried to publicize deals and other actions that signal that they value journalism, they have simultaneously argued in court, to lawmakers and to federal agencies that they have no obligation at all to the creators of the intellectual property they use to power their products.
To be clear, I’m raising these concerns not because news organizations should fear competition. If the tech companies were committing real resources into putting their own reporters on the ground to produce original journalism, I would welcome that. But that is not what is happening. The tech platforms have never made serious attempts to create the original, underlying work — like local reporting, investigative reporting or rigorous product testing — that their users, platforms and A.I. products depend on. And now they go a step further, simply taking the reporting and coverage of others, often even presenting it as their own. One study found that OpenA.I. credited news organizations that had unearthed the information it cited in just 1 percent of responses.
The leaders of previous tech driven shifts at least tried to argue that their platforms would be symbiotic with creators. For example, Spotify, which has its critics in the music industry, highlights the payments it sends to musical artists. The A.I. companies, in contrast, have adopted a more overtly parasitic posture, one more akin to Napster, the old pirated music platform. A top researcher at Microsoft wrote that one of the “core promises of LLMs” is their ability to use “their training data to substitute for the paid labor of those who created said data.” More evocatively, the science fiction writer Margaret Atwood likened this dynamic to being “murdered by my replica.”
It’s a safe bet that such actions by the tech giants will fuel destructive trends already straining society. A continued decline in original reporting. A continued surge in misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, deepfakes and computer-generated slop. A public that continues to be radicalized by algorithms that amplify fear, anger and division.
Reporters are the ones enriching the public record with previously unknown information. That surprising fact. That telling detail. That quote from the eyewitness. That secret document. That bit of expert analysis. That photo, video, audio recording. Put simply, original reporting is very often how you know what you know. A.I. products, of course, cannot do this type of original reporting. They mine the public record but struggle to add to it.
Even the mining has been problematic. Research by the European Broadcasting Union found that the leading A.I. assistants significantly misrepresented the news in nearly half of all answers. Both Google and Apple, for example, have made major mistakes while using A.I. tools to rewrite news organizations headlines and new alerts that appear in their products. Because A.I. tends to be bad at expressing uncertainty, it’s often not just wrong, but confidently wrong. And unlike the news organizations they’re stealing from, A.I. companies don’t track or correct such errors, leaving their users without any way of knowing when they’ve been misled.
This matters in part because A.I. products are likely not just to supplement but replace direct relationships with news organizations for many people. Surveys suggest this shift is happening far faster than most people imagine.
Amazon Web Services, which works with many A.I. companies, estimates that a majority of online content is already generated by A.I. — a number some experts expect to reach upward of 90 percent in the coming years. Already, the number of local news sites that are fake are reported to outnumber the sites that are real, as A.I. makes it harder for real sites to survive and easier for fake sites to be stood up cheaply.
Tellingly, A.I. companies don’t want to say that their products’ output is reliable. They don’t want to say it’s fair, or that it’s accurate. That’s in part because it isn’t. When American political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year, for instance, Perplexity’s bot suggested the White House’s statement on Kirk’s death was fabricated and X’s Grok insisted he was alive and well. But just as importantly, A.I. companies decline to stand behind the things their chatbots tell users in an attempt to evade legal liability. Microsoft warned when it launched Copilot: “For entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.”
On some level, the public understands this will not be good for them. Two-thirds of Americans are highly concerned about A.I. spreading inaccurate information, according to Pew Research Center. But a growing percentage of people nevertheless rely on A.I. for news, information and guidance, and some regard it as more trustworthy than the news organizations it depends on for its answers.
All of this will worsen the alarming decline of social and civic health. Evidence shows that when a local news organization fails people in a community start to trust each other less and hate each other more. They become more isolated and less tolerant. Civic engagement declines and public corruption rises.
And imagine what happens when the tech companies’ approach to the news industry reaches its logical conclusion. Despite journalism’s importance to the world’s most valuable technology, the actions of the tech companies are jeopardizing their most important source of new news, new information, new analysis. That would make the A.I. products themselves less useful and less reliable — another unnecessary casualty of unnecessary and damaging choices.
A faltering news industry may seem powerless against some of the wealthiest companies the world has ever seen. And the path ahead is made no easier by the reality that we must continue to operate in an information ecosystem disproportionately controlled by these tech giants. But there are still actions we can take, both to stand up to abuses by A.I. companies and to prepare our own organizations to succeed in this new era. I’ll share a few ideas for each, which I offer with confidence that more and better ideas will emerge from the people in this room.
As it pertains to defending your work from tech companies, I’ve got four central thoughts:
Stand up for your rights. Intellectual property rights must hold if our profession is to have a path forward. In my country, these rights are anchored in the Constitution and supported by centuries of precedent. They are also consistent with a basic ethical understanding that stealing is wrong. But your rights will only hold if you insist that they be respected and push back when they are not. This will take courage — and sometimes resources, which are in short supply — but the alternative path of quietly tolerating the systematic theft of your work will eventually end your ability to continue it.
Deal carefully. News organizations signing deals to license content to A.I. companies is reasonable. But I urge you to consider the long-term viability of each deal. The tech giants have extraordinary leverage: They have already taken your content and intend to use it regardless. Even so, before agreeing to an offer, it’s worth asking whether the payment reflects anything close to fair value — and whether you’re retaining any meaningful say over how your work is used.
Push your legislators. A.I. is increasingly unpopular with the public. As lawmakers consider how to respond, our industry needs to come together with a short list of clear, compelling asks. Here are some starter ideas: Ensure the currently robust protections for intellectual property are reinforced — not weakened — for the A.I. era. Require bots to identify themselves and constrain their ability to strip websites without permission. Require transparency so news organizations know when and how their work is used by AI. Ensure A.I. companies bear legal responsibility for the defamatory content they generate.
Join together. We face A.I. companies spending untold millions in marketing, lobbying and political donations to persuade the public and co-opt politicians. The VC firm behind many A.I. investments is now the top political donor in the United States. The news industry’s only path to counteracting that influence is by working together and, just as importantly, with other creative industries. Join amicus briefs and be active in your trade associations. Study how our colleagues in music and other professions managed through their Napster moments.
There are also things we can do to make our own news organizations more resilient as we take on this challenge. Again, four ideas:
Use A.I. the right way. Newsrooms should create thoughtful standards for the responsible use of AI. Then they should be aggressive and creative in putting the technology to work to improve their journalism and strengthen their businesses. A.I. can bring real value to organizations that find the right ways to embrace it, and a shift of this size will lay waste to any organization that refuses to evolve. There’s nothing inherently bad about A.I. technology — it’s the actions of the companies behind it that need reforming.
Be a destination first. A world increasingly intermediated by A.I. platforms would leave news organizations even more at the mercy of tech giants to share traffic, credit and money. The clearest path to support quality reporting will be through direct relationships with audiences. Being a destination doesn’t mean ignoring the broader internet. You still must make new relationships where people are, which is usually a tech platform. But to deepen those relationships — to make them loyal, habituated and valuable — your audience must learn it’s better to engage with you directly rather than through someone else.
Focus on original reporting. Many news organizations undermined and commoditized themselves trying to feed the constantly shifting preferences of search and social algorithms with clickbait, aggregation and hot takes. The economics of that approach will get even worse. To be a destination in a world intermediated by A.I., you’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity. The heart of that is original reporting. The public has no other source for this work. Neither does AI.
Explain why journalism matters. A.I. companies have giant megaphones and have studiously and selectively communicated the benefits of their work while also downplaying the harms. The news industry must, in turn, make the case that original reporting is an essential ingredient in healthy societies, secure nations and strong democracies — and show how the actions of the tech giants are putting it at risk.
In the last digital transition, news organizations — including for a while The Times — bought into Silicon Valley’s often repeated assertion that “information wants to be free.” Many didn’t even know the original quote, from the tech philosopher Stewart Brand, had another part: “Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life.”
We cannot afford to be as naive this time. News organizations are collectively smaller and weaker than two decades ago. Tech giants are bigger and stronger — and far more willing to use their size and power. Meanwhile, the A.I. wave itself may be bigger and faster as the technology continues to improve. Even if things are feeling fine now, remember that these early swells herald an approaching tsunami.
As we prepare, we must remind ourselves: Information is valuable. Journalism is valuable.
The internet is already overwhelmed by bots and slop. It is becoming harder and harder to know where things came from and whether they are true. This has led to a growing sense that nothing can be trusted, requiring an almost paranoid vigilance from everyone about everything or, worse, a descent into nihilism. The effect isn’t just that people believe untrue things, it is that they no longer believe true things. That toxic combination is already leading more people to disengage altogether. The tech companies wave their hands at these trends and say “not our fault” and, perhaps more tellingly, “not our problem.”
News organizations should stand up as the reliable alternative to this mess. News and information that can be trusted is rarer and more needed than ever. The kind produced by teams of experienced professionals supported by rigorous processes and standards. According to surveys, when someone wants to check something they’ve encountered that they think might be false, the preferred option is “a news source I trust.” Very last on the list? An A.I. chatbot.
I remain convinced of the value created by quality news organizations dedicated to the hard, expensive work of original reporting — to readers, to communities, to society as a whole. And, yes, even to A.I. models.
Who else will go to the places where events are unfolding? Bring us firsthand accounts from the front lines of war? Equip us with reliable information in a public health crisis? Expose the high-flying company or political career built on a lie? Ensure debates about economic policies are informed by their impacts on real people? Who else can enrich all this work with hard-won expertise that adds insight and context, and deeply ingrained professional commitments to make each story as fair and accurate as possible?
The question is whether that value will be leached up by tech giants, or whether that value will return to news organizations to allow them to continue this essential work.
I hope you all take this question seriously. I believe the future of our news organizations and the health of the public square depends on how we respond. Thank you.
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