More than 40 publishers, including The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and The Economist, have joined an international coalition seeking to prevent artificial intelligence companies from using journalism without permission or payment.
The Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition, known as SPUR, now says it represents more than 80 organisations in over 20 countries. The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers are among the latest members, joining founding participants that include the BBC, Financial Times and Associated Press.
The expansion, announced on Monday, 12 October, gives the initiative greater weight as publishers seek common rules for how AI systems discover, copy, summarise and train on professionally produced content.
SPUR is developing technical standards that could allow publishers to state how their material may be used, track when AI agents access it and support licensing arrangements. Its central argument is that innovation can continue without removing the right of journalists and publishers to control and earn from their work.
A technical answer to a commercial dispute
The immediate problem is not simply whether an AI chatbot can reproduce an article. Publishers are concerned about several stages of the technology’s operation, including the collection of online material for model training, retrieval of fresh reporting to answer users’ questions and the display of summaries that may reduce visits to the original website.
Individual publishers can place instructions in website files or negotiate separate agreements with technology companies. However, those approaches are difficult to enforce consistently across thousands of AI tools, crawlers and automated agents.
SPUR wants a shared system that can be understood by both publishers and AI developers. Its recently introduced Content Telemetry Standard is intended to create a common way for AI agents to record and report their use of media content.
If widely adopted, telemetry could help establish an evidence trail showing which material was accessed, how it was used and whether a licence was required. That information would be important when calculating compensation or resolving disputes.
The coalition is funded by its members and says it is building industry-wide standards rather than a single commercial product. Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, The New York Times’ head of strategic partnerships and chief of staff, said intellectual-property protection and technological progress must be able to coexist.
Publishers face pressure from two directions
The push for standards comes as media companies confront both alleged copyright infringement and declining referral traffic.
News organisations, authors and other rights holders have filed a growing number of legal claims over the material used to train large language models. The defendants generally dispute infringement allegations or argue that their use of publicly available content is lawful. The cases are moving through different courts and have not produced a single global rule.
Litigation is expensive and slow, particularly for smaller publishers. A technical standard could complement legal action by giving content owners more precise tools to express their choices and document usage before a dispute reaches court.
The second concern is economic. AI-generated answers in search engines and chat services can provide readers with information without requiring them to visit the publisher that produced it.
Google organic-search referrals to more than 2,500 websites fell by 33 per cent between November 2024 and November 2025, according to a Reuters Institute report that cited data from digital analytics company Chartbeat. The decline cannot be attributed to a single cause, but it illustrates the scale of the traffic challenge facing online publishers.
Fewer visits can mean lower advertising revenue, fewer subscriptions and weaker recognition of the original source. The risk is particularly severe for newsrooms that fund reporting through digital audiences rather than large commercial or philanthropic reserves.
Why the standards matter beyond large Western publishers
The biggest names may dominate the announcement, but the proposed system could be even more important for publishers in Africa and other under-represented markets.
Local news organisations produce reporting, cultural knowledge, language resources and community records that may be difficult to replace. Yet many do not have the legal budgets or technical teams needed to monitor automated copying or negotiate individual licences with global technology companies.
A common, affordable standard could give these publishers a clearer way to signal permitted uses, demand attribution and participate in licensing markets. It could also make it harder for AI companies to claim that smaller websites lacked a recognised mechanism for expressing their preferences.
However, a standard will only be useful if AI companies adopt it, publishers can implement it without excessive cost and independent systems can verify compliance. Participation by more than 80 organisations is significant, but it does not by itself make the rules binding.
There are also unresolved questions about how licence payments would be calculated, how revenue would reach freelance journalists and photographers, and how standards would work alongside copyright laws that differ between countries.
A contest over the value of original reporting
The SPUR expansion reflects a wider shift in the AI debate. Publishers are moving beyond asking technology companies to respect website restrictions and are trying to build infrastructure that can support enforceable permissions, transparent usage records and payment.
For AI developers, reliable licensing systems could reduce uncertainty and provide access to trusted, current material. For publishers, they offer a chance to protect the economic foundation of original reporting without rejecting useful technology.
The test will be whether the coalition can turn shared principles into standards used across the internet. Publishers, journalists and technology companies should follow the Content Telemetry Standard closely and ensure that smaller newsrooms are represented as the rules develop. The future of AI information services depends partly on whether the people producing reliable information can continue to finance that work.
