TL;DR
The Economist, AFP and The New York Times signed up on Monday 12 October to SPUR, short for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, Reuters reports, taking its membership past 80 organisations in more than 20 countries. SPUR was set up in London in February by British titles including the BBC, Sky News and the Financial Times, and the new intake includes ITV News, The Observer and consumer group Which?, according to Press Gazette. The coalition’s bet is that a shared technical standard, not lawsuits alone, will force AI firms to pay.
Who joined and why
Reuters counts more than 40 new members in this round, among them The Atlantic and Brazil’s newspaper association. Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, a senior vice-president at the Times, said in a statement that protecting intellectual property and advancing technology “can and must co-exist”. Her paper was the first to sue OpenAI over scraping, in December 2023, and Press Gazette notes it has since taken on Perplexity as well, while licensing its content to Amazon.
The motive is as much about traffic as training data. Reuters cites a Reuters Institute report, drawing on Chartbeat data, that found Google search referrals to over 2,500 sites fell by a third in the year to November 2025 as AI-generated answers kept readers on the results page.
What SPUR is building
The coalition is paid for wholly by its members and is writing common standards and technical tooling so publishers can monitor and govern AI companies’ use of their work, and strike licensing deals on that basis. Its Content Telemetry Standard, launched earlier this month, is designed to log when a scraper fetches an article, when the text is loaded into an agent’s context, how it is cited and displayed in an answer, and whether a reader clicks, copies or acts on it. Press Gazette reports SPUR has begun working alongside industry partners to get the framework adopted.
The UK contingent is notable. Beyond the founders, Press Gazette lists Blog Preston, the News Media Association and the Independent Community News Network among new joiners, which puts hyperlocal and trade titles in the same tent as the FT and BBC.
Looking forward
SPUR co-founder David Buttle argues publishers cannot “simply hope for the best” and must set industry-wide rules of engagement, since AI models rest on journalism that in many cases, he says, “is literally being stolen”. Press Gazette observes that the membership blends litigants, deal-makers and those doing neither; OpenAI alone has around 20 licensing agreements and about as many lawsuits against it. In our view, that spread is the coalition’s strength and its weakness: a telemetry standard only pays out if AI companies adopt it, and the publishers most able to compel adoption are the ones already negotiating bilaterally. For UK regional and specialist publishers, joining costs little and buys a seat at a table they could not reach alone.