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A few weeks ago I wrote about how news publishers needed a different type of agreement with technology companies from the “partnership” schemes of the past. If journalism is to survive the dual and often identical pressures of political hostility and market disruption, it will need more protection from its infrastructure providers. This week, the extent to which journalists and news publishers can retain control over their work in an AI-driven environment took a step in what could be a positive direction: the formation of SPUR, or Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, an alliance of a handful of news publishers in the United Kingdom. The group includes the BBC, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, Sky News, and The Guardian, where I was a longtime employee and now serve as a nonexecutive director of Guardian Media Group.

Collegiality between news operators is a rare thing, particularly those that, like the Telegraph and Guardian, occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum and in all other respects might be regarded as competitors. But the collegiality to be found in resisting the worst, uncompensated excesses of AI overrides most existing differences. An open letter from the CEOs of the new alliance sets out ambitions that go beyond money (although that would be appreciated too) and into difficult questions that ultimately will ask as much of the news organizations as they will of the AI companies.

In a bullet-pointed list—which looks suspiciously like an AI-generated summary, but almost certainly wasn’t—SPUR’s objectives are clear and ambitious: putting guardrails around responsible AI use, reducing “friction” in licensing deals, and other points that aim to take back control of their relationship with the AI industry without being left behind. The aim is to recruit other publishers from around the world, and make SPUR a global alliance.

One wonders where this leaves the United States, where the majority of publishing capital and every major AI company targeted by SPUR reside—and where the commercial press and the deployment of AI are both clearly moving under the control of the Trump administration. Would a global alliance setting content standards accept the Washington Post as a member? Or CBS News? These news organizations are owned by people (Jeff Bezos in the Post’s case and David Ellison in that of Paramount, the parent of CBS) whose vast personal wealth derives at least in part from the AI economy, and whose viability is sustained by alignment with the US government. Are these the right companies to be setting standards for AI use in journalism? SPUR may need to differentiate between the news publishers that are the most invested in the protection of journalism and those aligned with the furtherance of techno-authoritarianism. 

Control over the technologies that drive information, and the narratives that shape the deployment of those technologies, is central not only to how and whether journalism survives. It’s also an existential question for the world—as we saw when, last week, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, refused to meet certain Pentagon demands around using the company’s technology for autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance. That refusal provoked a presidential rebuke via Truth Social (“The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE”), and the Pentagon designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk.” (According to reports, Anthropic’s Claude model was in fact used extensively in the Operation Epic Fury attacks on Iran—though when I prompted Claude, “Were you used to attack Iran this weekend?” the bot responded, “No, I was not.” Google’s AI Overview disagreed.)  

These recent events illustrate how the combination of ultra-powerful tech companies and the rise of authoritarianism poses a risk to global democracy—and, by extension, to journalism. The reason SPUR arrives at precisely the right time is that it is necessary to ask questions not only about what kind of relationship journalism should demand from technology companies, but about what kind of independence journalism needs to define for itself away from structures that are inherently against the interests of plurality and independence.

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