TL;DR

The Reuters Institute’s 2026 report on generative AI and news, published on 29 October, finds weekly use of chatbots such as ChatGPT has reached 51% in the six countries it has tracked since 2024, up from 34% a year ago. The UK is the outlier: weekly use is lowest there, at 42%, Britons are the least likely to notice AI on news sites, and they are the most negative of the nine countries about AI’s effect on news. Comfort with news made wholly by AI has barely shifted since 2024.

Use is climbing fast

YouGov polled about 2,000 people in each of nine countries between 14 August and 28 September for the Oxford institute. In the six-country trend group, daily use is four times its 2024 level, at 28% against 7%. ChatGPT remains the most used tool, climbing 12 points to 34% weekly, while Google’s Gemini more than doubled to 24% and Anthropic’s Claude reached 7%, up six points.

Looking things up is now the top use in those countries, cited by 38% for the past week. Using it for news specifically is still a minority habit, at 9% in the trend countries, though up from 3% in 2024. Among people who do use AI for news, 17% said they had used it in the past week to try to get round a paywall.

The British exception

UK respondents stand apart on several measures. Just 28% of Britons had spotted any AI tool on news sites or apps in the previous week, against about two-thirds in Argentina and Finland, and the UK ranked lowest on every feature the survey asked about. The authors describe UK respondents as “much more pessimistic” about AI’s impact on society than those elsewhere.

On news production, the gap between comfort with all-human journalism and all-AI news reaches 70 points in the UK, second only to Finland. Across the nine countries, only 12% say they are at ease with fully AI-produced news, or 19% if humans oversee it. In the six trend countries, that first figure has sat between 12% and 14% since 2024.

Looking Forward

For UK publishers, the findings cut two ways. Search engines remain the main place people meet AI, with 57% seeing AI summaries in the past week, and the authors find chatbot users more likely to say they now use search less. Yet British audiences are among the least receptive to AI-made journalism, which in our view makes transparency about AI use a commercial question as much as an ethical one. Recent UK cases, such as AI copy running under former staff bylines at Clickout Media, show what is at stake.