NYT, AFP and The Economist join 80-member coalition to curb unauthorised AI content use

NEW YORK: Publishers are drawing a line in the digital sand as artificial intelligence firms mine their work. The New York Times, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and The Economist have joined a coalition of more than 40 publishers seeking to prevent AI companies from using or profiting from their content without permission.

The Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition, launched in February, now has more than 80 members across more than 20 countries. New members include The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, joining founding members such as the Financial Times, BBC and Associated Press.

The move comes as publishers intensify legal efforts to protect their intellectual property from unauthorised use in training large language models and powering AI services. Earlier this month, USA Today and several newspapers it owns sued OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement.

OpenAI and its backer, Microsoft, also face similar claims from prominent authors and news organisations, including The New York Times.

Funded entirely by its members, SPUR is developing industry-wide standards and technical systems to help publishers track and control how AI companies use their content, while facilitating licensing agreements, according to its website.

The initiative aims to establish a more consistent framework for content usage and compensation, giving publishers greater visibility into how their work is accessed by AI systems.

“Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist,” Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, head of strategic partnerships and chief of staff at The New York Times, said in a statement.

SPUR has also introduced its Content Telemetry Standard, designed to standardise how AI agents record and report their use of media content. The initiative is intended to improve transparency and help ensure that creators are compensated when their work is used.

Copyright disputes are only one front in the publishers’ battle with AI. News organisations are also grappling with declining referral traffic as search engines introduce AI-generated answers that allow users to find information without visiting the original websites.

Google’s 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 data from Chartbeat.

For publishers, the combination of unauthorised content use and shrinking web traffic threatens an established business model in which original journalism attracts readers, advertising and subscriptions.

SPUR’s growing membership reflects a broader push to negotiate with AI companies from a position of collective strength. The challenge now is to turn common standards into effective safeguards, ensuring that the race to build smarter machines does not leave the people producing the information behind.