Senior heads across the U.K.’s news landscape have come together to form a coalition in the face of AI’s growing influence.
In an open letter, BBC director-general Tim Davie, Financial Times CEO Jon Slade, The Guardian CEO Anna Bateson, Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, and Telegraph Media Group CEO Anna Jones have invited “global leaders across publishing, broadcasting, media and news” — to join as founding members of SPUR (the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition).
In the letter, the five execs said that AI was “fundamentally reshaping how content is created, distributed, discovered and monetised” and asserted that “we need to come together to protect original journalism and secure the long-term sustainability of our industry.”
While AI brought opportunity for publishers and audiences, it also raises “urgent questions about fairness, consent, attribution, transparency and trust,” they said.
“Across the industry, our reporting, our archives, our original content, have become foundational training material for AI systems. This material has been scraped, copied and reused with no common standards to enable permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism. The lack of transparency about how AI answers are created risks eroding public trust in both the news and the technologies used to access it.”
The reported mission of SPUR is to “establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways, while guaranteeing that publishers retain practical control of their content and receive fair value when it is used.”
According to the letter, it will aim to develop shared industry standards, reduce friction in licensing and “bridge the gap” between publishers and AI developers, while also identifying “gaps in the technical tools needed to protect intellectual property.”