New York Times joins SPUR as publisher AI-rights coalition reaches 80 members

The New York Times has joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition, or SPUR, in an expansion of more than 40 members that takes the group to 80 publishers and publishing associations across more than 20 countries. The coalition is seeking common standards for AI licensing agreements and fairer payment terms from AI companies. The other new members include The Atlantic, The Economist, ITV News and The Observer, alongside Blog Preston, The Logic, Hong Kong Free Press, Stuff, DPG Media, Which?, Quanta Magazine and L'Equipe. New trade-body participants include the News Media Association, Independent Community News Network, International News Media Association, Brazilian Association of Newspapers, Interamerican Press Association, Magazines Canada and the Public Media Alliance. Press Gazette said it had joined as an associate member. The Times said intellectual-property protection and technological progress “can and must co-exist.” Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, its senior vice-president for strategic partnerships and executive operations, said the publisher wanted standards and copyright protections that were not “unilaterally set by tech platforms.” Its arrival brings a publisher that has pursued both litigation and licensing into a coalition whose membership includes organisations taking either approach, both, or neither. The Times sued OpenAI in December 2023 over the alleged unauthorised scraping of its content, in what Press Gazette described as the first and most prominent publisher suit against the company. The case had not reached trial when the report was published, and the Times later sued Perplexity. At the same time, the Times struck an AI licensing agreement with Amazon in May 2025. That agreement covers real-time summaries and short excerpts in Amazon products including Alexa, as well as use of Times content to train Amazon AI models. Across the industry, OpenAI has signed about 20 publisher licensing deals while facing a similar number of active lawsuits, including claims brought by publisher coalitions. SPUR was launched in February by The Guardian, Financial Times, The Telegraph, BBC and Sky News. Mediahuis, the Associated Press and CMA Media subsequently became founding members under a membership structure in which they paid more. The coalition’s membership now spans publishers with sharply differing commercial and legal strategies, but with a shared interest in setting the terms on which AI systems use journalism. As we reported this month, SPUR has already published its Content Telemetry Standard, a framework intended to provide publishers with a record of AI use of their material. It covers content being retrieved by scrapers, loaded into a model or agent’s generation context, cited in an answer, displayed to users and engaged with through actions including clicking, copying and sharing. The released version 1.0 replaced a preview specification after a public-comment period from June 12 to July 24. The project’s public GitHub record shows that consultation generated 29 specification threads, three profile threads and five pull requests; the release includes 171 test fixtures, 15 validated worked examples and 59 mutation checks run through continuous integration. SPUR has invited OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Microsoft to join an invitation-only AI Licensing Advisory Board intended to guide implementation. Google said it frequently engaged with SPUR and other associations. SPUR is also developing tools to help AI companies adopt the reporting measures and plans pilots and proofs of concept with technology companies. The coalition’s first technical committee meeting is set for Oct. 15 to determine how it will audit and evidence the signals AI tools send to publishers.