New York Times among surge of sign-ups to publisher AI coalition SPUR

SPUR members are seeking fair payment terms from AI companies.

new york times office from street with taxi going past in front — The New York Times building. Picture: Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images

The New York Times is part of a massive expansion of the SPUR coalition of publishers seeking to agree common standards for AI licensing deals.

The New York Times was the first and most high profile publisher to sue ChatGPT creator OpenAI for the unauthorised scraping of its content in December 2023, in a case that has not yet reached trial. The publisher sued Perplexity two years later.

It is now among more than 40 new SPUR (the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition) members, also including The Atlantic, The Economist, ITV News and The Observer. Press Gazette has also joined as an associate member.

Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, SVP of strategic partnerships and executive operations at The New York Times, said: “Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist.

“High-quality journalism is crucial to healthy democracies and to the functioning of AI products and experiences. We are proud to work with SPUR to develop robust standards and protections for copyrighted content that are not unilaterally set by tech platforms.”

The New York Times has one AI licensing agreement with Amazon, announced in May 2025, which covers real-time display of summaries and short excerpts of content within Amazon products and services like voice assistant Alexa, plus the use of its content to train Amazon’s AI models.

OpenAI has signed around 20 AI licensing deals with publishers in total and has a similar number of lawsuits active against it (with several filed by coalitions of multiple publishers). Other AI deals have been done with Perplexity, Amazon and Meta.

SPUR was launched in February by The Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, BBC and Sky News and has since added Mediahuis, the Associated Press and French publisher CMA Media as founding members (they are classed as such even if they joined later as they pay more to be members).

Earlier this month SPUR launched its open-source content telemetry standard, described as a “market first move to create a standardised process by which AI agents and model builders record how they use media content and report that usage back to publishers”.

It is designed to track an AI scraper retrieving content from a website, grounding (content being loaded into an AI agent’s generation context), how content is cited in AI answers, how a user actually sees content displayed within an AI answer, and whether a user engaged with the content by clicking on it, copying it, sharing it or directing an AI agent to act on it.

SPUR said it is now working with industry partners to ensure the framework is used effectively. It is also developing tools to make sure AI companies can easily adopt the measures to improve the efficacy of licensing talks.

The total number of SPUR members (both publishers and publishing associations) has now reached 80 from more than 20 countries.

Between them there is a mix of those suing one or more AI company, those doing deals, a mixture of both, or those doing neither.

Other new additions include UK local brand Blog Preston, Canadian business and tech publication The Logic, the Hong Kong Free Press, New Zealand newsbrand Stuff, Belgian media group DPG Media, UK consumer brand Which?, Quanta Magazine and French sports newsbrand L’Equipe.

Publishing associations and trade bodies newly taking part include the UK’s News Media Association and Independent Community News Network, the International News Media Association (INMA), the Brazilian Association of Newspapers, the Interamerican Press Association, Magazines Canada and the Public Media Alliance.

SPUR co-founder David Buttle said: “We can’t simply hope for the best when it comes to AI companies and the future of publishing. Media organisations across the world must come together to protect themselves, each other and the future of journalism. There is rapidly growing momentum behind our effort to build a fairer, more sustainable information economy. We know that high-quality journalism forms the foundations of AI models yet, as it stands, publishers have no mechanism to ensure they are fairly compensated for their work. In many cases, their output is literally being stolen.

“As AI transforms every aspect of the global media market, maintaining the principles and integrity of original journalism requires stakeholders to come together and establish clear, industry-wide rules of engagement.”