The New York Times and The Economist are among more than 40 new members of the SPUR publisher coalition as of 13 October, Press Gazette reported. The group now has 80 members from more than 20 countries behind its effort to establish common standards for AI licensing.
Key points
- The Atlantic, ITV News and The Observer are also among the new members.
- SPUR has grown to 80 members from more than 20 countries.
- Its new telemetry standard is intended to track several ways AI systems use publisher content.
SPUR expands to 80 members
The Atlantic, ITV News, The Observer and Agence France-Presse are also among the additions. SPUR’s membership includes publishers and publishing associations, with the News Media Association in the UK, Magazines Canada and the International News Media Association among the trade bodies newly taking part.
The Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, BBC and Sky News launched SPUR in February to pursue shared standards for AI licensing deals. Its membership spans publishers that have sued AI companies, signed deals, done both or done neither.
David Buttle, a SPUR co-founder, said publishers need to act together to set rules for their dealings with AI companies. He argued that publishers have “no mechanism to ensure they are fairly compensated for their work”. That is the coalition’s case for collective standards, rather than a claim that every member has taken the same approach to licensing.
SPUR’s telemetry standard tracks AI use
Earlier in October, SPUR launched an open-source content telemetry standard intended to give AI agents and model builders a common way to record their use of media content and report it to publishers. The group describes the standard as a step towards more effective licensing talks.
The proposed tracking covers a scraper retrieving an article from a website and content being loaded into an AI agent’s generation context. It also covers citations in AI answers, what a user sees displayed in an answer, and actions such as clicking, copying or sharing the content.
Those are different uses for a publisher trying to understand where its work goes. SPUR says it is working with industry partners on use of the framework and developing tools intended to make adoption easier for AI companies.
New York Times brings lawsuit and licence
The New York Times brings a position on both sides of the licensing dispute. It sued OpenAI in December 2023 over alleged unauthorised scraping of its content, in a case that has not reached trial, and announced an AI licensing agreement with Amazon in May 2025.
That agreement covers short excerpts and real-time summaries in Amazon products and services, including Alexa, as well as use of the newspaper’s content to train Amazon AI models. OpenAI has signed around 20 AI licensing deals with publishers, Press Gazette reported.
Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, an SVP at The New York Times, said safeguarding creators’ rights and advances in technology can go hand in hand. She said the newspaper wanted standards for copyrighted content that were “not unilaterally set by tech platforms”.
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