NYT, Economist and AFP Join Global Coalition Against Unpaid AI Use of News
PARIS: Forty major media groups, including The New York Times, The Economist and Agence France-Presse, have joined the global AI copyright coalition pressing artificial intelligence companies to stop using journalism without permission.
The coalition, known as SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), announced the expansion on Tuesday. Launched in February, it already counted the BBC, The Financial Times and the Associated Press among its members.
The latest additions double the coalition’s size. More than 80 organisations across over 20 countries are now part of the effort, according to Reuters. New members also include The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers.
What the AI copyright coalition wants
SPUR says it will help media companies track their content, expose illegal copyright theft, and negotiate commercial deals with the AI groups behind services such as ChatGPT and Claude.
“There is rapidly growing momentum behind our effort to build a fairer, more sustainable information economy,” David Buttle, the coalition’s co-founder and spokesperson, said in a statement.
The group is developing common technical and commercial standards for the industry. Earlier this month it released the first version of its Content Telemetry Standard, an open-source framework that records when publisher content is retrieved, used to ground an AI answer, cited, displayed or engaged with through an AI platform.
SPUR is funded entirely by its members. It is not a collective licensing body: publishers keep control of their own commercial agreements while the coalition builds shared infrastructure around permissions, measurement and licensing.
“Original journalistic value must be recognised”
Fabrice Fries, chairman and chief executive officer of AFP, said millions of people rely on AI assistants every day for information gathered and verified by news agency journalists.
“That original journalistic value must be recognised, credited and fairly compensated,” he said. “Content traceability is not only a matter of intellectual property; it is also essential to maintaining public trust.”
Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, the New York Times’ head of strategic partnerships, said intellectual property protection and technological advancement “can and must co-exist”.
Publishers are also losing referral traffic as search engines roll out AI-generated answers. Google organic-search referrals to more than 2,500 websites fell 33 per cent globally between November 2024 and November 2025, according to a Reuters Institute report citing Chartbeat data.
Legal pressure is building as well. Earlier this month, USA Today and several newspapers it owns sued OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement. OpenAI and its backer Microsoft also face similar claims from authors and news organisations over the use of their work to train large language models, including the New York Times.
What it means for Pakistani publishers
The fight is not limited to Western media houses. Pakistani publishers face the same scraping of their reporting by AI systems, with little visibility into how their work is used and no compensation when it powers an AI answer.
For newsrooms in Pakistan, the coalition’s telemetry standard could eventually offer something they have never had: a technical record of when their journalism feeds an AI response. That matters in a market where original reporting is expensive to produce and easy to lift.
Our own newsroom rules already require every story to carry a genuine original element — a local angle, a verified update or our own data — because single-source rewrites add nothing for the reader. The SPUR fight is the industry-wide version of the same principle: journalism has a cost, and those who build products on it should pay for it.
What is the SPUR coalition?
SPUR stands for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights. It is a global coalition of publishers, launched in February, that develops technical and commercial standards so AI companies cannot use journalism without permission or payment.
Which media groups just joined?
Forty new members joined, including The New York Times, The Economist, Agence France-Presse, The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers. Founding members include the BBC, the Financial Times and the Associated Press.
How would the Content Telemetry Standard work?
It is an open-source framework that records when publisher content is retrieved, used to ground an AI answer, cited or displayed by an AI platform, creating a measurable trail publishers can use in licensing talks.
