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May 10, 2026 — The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and The Economist have joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition, a growing publisher alliance that wants to stop artificial intelligence companies from using and profiting from news content without permission. SPUR, launched in February, now has more than 80 members across over 20 countries. The group is developing licensing standards and technical tools that would let publishers track, control and be compensated for how AI models use their reporting.
SPUR’s newest members include The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers. They join founding organizations such as the Financial Times, BBC and Associated Press. According to SPUR’s website, the coalition is funded entirely by its members and focuses on industry-wide standards and technical systems that help publishers manage how AI companies use their content and negotiate licensing agreements.
The rapid expansion sends a clear signal: news organizations are moving from isolated responses to a coordinated, industry-level strategy. More than 80 member organizations across more than 20 countries give SPUR a level of international weight that few individual publishers could command on their own. That matters when negotiating with AI platforms that operate on a global scale.
Publishers are not waiting for standards to be built before taking legal action. Recently, Gannett’s USA Today and several of its local newspapers filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. OpenAI and its largest backer, Microsoft, also face copyright claims from prominent authors and news organizations, including The New York Times, which sued in late 2023 over the use of its journalism to train large language models.
Yet some of the same publishers are willing to strike commercial deals. The Associated Press and the Financial Times, both founding members of SPUR, have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI. The Atlantic, one of SPUR’s newest members, has also previously worked out an arrangement with OpenAI. This mix of plaintiffs and partners is not a contradiction. It shows that even publishers with direct financial relationships with AI companies still want common rules and shared measurement tools.
Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, the New York Times’ head of strategic partnerships and chief of staff, said in a statement that “intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist.” That line captures the industry’s real position: few publishers want AI development to stop, but most want it to operate with transparency and consent.
SPUR recently introduced its Content Telemetry Standard, an effort to standardize how AI agents record and report their use of media content. The goal is to give publishers a clear, auditable picture of when their articles, images or other protected materials are used by AI systems, including for training and for generating answers.
The telemetry approach moves the debate beyond the binary question of whether AI training constitutes fair use. It creates a practical layer that works in either legal scenario. If courts accept broad fair-use claims, publishers still have a tool to track usage and negotiate voluntary payments. If courts side with publishers, the same standard can help enforce licensing obligations.
For that reason, SPUR is not simply an anti-AI movement. It is an attempt to build infrastructure for a marketplace in which AI companies can use licensed journalism under clearly defined terms. The Content Telemetry Standard is still new, and adoption remains the biggest question. But its introduction marks a shift from reactive lawsuits to proactive standards-building.
The urgency behind SPUR’s work is easy to understand when looking at traffic data. A Reuters Institute report, citing data from Chartbeat, found that Google organic-search referrals to more than 2,500 websites fell 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025. Search engines are increasingly serving AI-generated answers that let users receive information without clicking through to the publisher’s site.
Google’s AI Overviews and OpenAI’s ChatGPT search have made zero-click behavior more common. Users can now get a summary of a news event without ever visiting the website that uncovered the facts. When users do not click, publishers lose ad revenue, subscription leads and insight into their audiences.
This structural decline in referral traffic makes licensing revenue more important. If AI companies are going to use news content to power their products, publishers want a reasonable share of the value created. But they cannot calculate or enforce that value without a common system for tracking usage. That is the gap SPUR is trying to fill.
The growing coalition also sends a signal to AI developers: negotiating with individual outlets one by one may work for a while, but the industry is organizing itself around shared rules and metrics. If SPUR’s standards gain broad adoption, AI firms may eventually need to integrate with a common system whenever they crawl, train on or display news content.
There are still open questions. The Content Telemetry Standard depends on adoption by both publishers and AI platforms. National laws, such as the EU copyright directive, may reinforce the approach, while U.S. court rulings could reshape it. The coalition’s ability to recruit more members across additional countries will also determine how much leverage it has.
But the trend is unmistakable. Publishers are moving from reactive complaints to proactive infrastructure. With more than 80 member organizations across more than 20 countries, SPUR is positioning itself as a coordinating body for the news industry’s response to generative AI — one that insists on permission, transparency and compensation as the default terms for AI’s use of journalism.
