Who Wins, Who Sues, Who Pays the Price

The Tow Center’s updated AI deals tracker reveals a complex landscape with striking geographic inequities.

If you wanted a snapshot of the tangled relationship between AI companies and the journalism industry, October provided. At the beginning of the month, the OpenAI Foundation distributed fifty million dollars to a hundred and sixty-three nonprofits in the United States, including twenty-nine journalistic organizations, among them the American Journalism Project, the Indigenous Journalists Association, and Trusting News, which helps newsrooms build trust with their audiences. A week later, USA Today Co. sued OpenAI in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement, seeking more than two hundred and fifty million dollars in damages; around the same time, a coalition of Canadian news organizations sued Anthropic, which had so far managed to avoid getting caught up in the web of journalism deals and disputes. Mid-month, Google expanded its AI pilot licensing program, which pays for content to “develop new AI features,” signing deals with more than four hundred publications worldwide. And more than forty journalistic organizations from the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Asia joined the SPUR coalition, which aims to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks for how generative AI applications use journalism.