GB News told staff in July that it was proposing to cut as many as 90 jobs, roughly a third of its workforce, as it introduced automated production workflows.

A spokesperson said the broadcaster “has led the way in introducing groundbreaking workflows in UK media” and that new positions would be created under the proposed structure. GB News had also introduced AI-generated sports bulletins on its radio service in 2024. But the company did not say AI alone accounted for the proposed cuts, or that it could operate with exactly 90 fewer employees.

The proposal is one entry in Press Gazette’s rolling tracker of journalism job cuts in 2026, which documents layoffs, buyouts, proposed redundancies and newsroom closures across the U.S. and U.K. Press Gazette counted at least 3,434 cuts in 2025, 3,875 in 2024 and about 6,000 in 2023. It has not published a comparable cumulative figure for 2026, so the tracker does not yet show whether layoffs are accelerating this year.

Recent entries show how varied the pressures are. Pink News proposed cutting up to 11 staff members after Snapchat began retiring its Shows and Publisher Stories formats, an important source of revenue for the publisher. Queen City Nerve, the Charlotte alternative publication, shut down after a proposed sale fell through. Walmart-backed gaming site Restart laid off its five-person editorial team. Four music publications also saw their editorial staffs reportedly gutted.

Other cuts have come during changes in ownership or newsroom structure. BuzzFeed cut about 180 employees after Byron Allen acquired the company. At the Chattanooga Times Free Press, more than 50 employees were laid off around the time Firecrown Media’s purchase of the newspaper took effect July 31. The sale had been announced to staff the previous day.

The Associated Press cut 20 U.S.-based journalists in May. In July, Press Gazette reported that the AP was planning up to 30 additional cuts while also planning a production hub in India. Those later cuts and the hub were proposals at the time, not completed changes.

AI is more explicit in some cases outside the tracker. E.W. Scripps eliminated 432 positions this year while CEO Adam Symson described a broader push toward automation and an “AI-powered” broadcast company.

Marketing firm Clickout Media also laid off writers at gaming sites including The Escapist and Videogamer as it shifted toward a smaller staff overseeing AI-generated content. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said AI was cited in 15,341 U.S. job cuts announced in March, about a quarter of that month’s total, according to a Media Copilot report.

Those examples show that AI is becoming one factor in newsroom restructuring. But the broader list does not support treating technology as the single explanation for journalism’s job losses.

Distribution remains another pressure point. Pink News depends heavily on Snapchat revenue. In Manitoba, the Free Press Community Review closed after a change in flyer distribution. Newsweek, meanwhile, has faced a steep decline in traffic while expanding other revenue streams. The Reuters Institute has tracked the broader changes in how audiences reach news as platforms and referral patterns shift.

Press Gazette says it will keep updating its tracker through the year. For now, the picture is less a single AI-driven wave than a collection of pressures — automation among them — pushing news organizations to operate with fewer people.

The post GB News cites automation as journalism job cuts continue in 2026 appeared first on The Media Copilot.

A six-person fact-checking team at India Today spends its days sorting through false and misleading images: AI-generated archival photos of politicians, flood footage taken out of context and deepfakes of prominent figures.

Now the team is testing Backstory, an experimental tool from Google DeepMind that brings several parts of that verification process into one place, according to Nieman Lab’s Andrew Deck.

A reporter can upload an image and ask Backstory a question. The tool then decides which checks to run. It can make a SynthID tool call to look for watermarks embedded in images created with Nano Banana, Google’s image-generation model. It can also check content credentials tied to the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity standard and trace where an image has appeared online.

The result is an AI-generated report with citations and a log of the steps Backstory took.

The potential time savings are a major attraction. Mike Caulfield, the digital literacy researcher who created the SIFT method, told Nieman Lab that Backstory can shrink one initial verification process that might take 50 minutes to about three.

Bal Krishna, who leads India Today’s fact-checking team, described the benefit another way: “It is doing all the work you might have done with five different tools, five different logins, in the same place.”

Backstory is free for now but available only through Google’s Trusted Testers Program. DeepMind has given access to thousands of journalists, open-source intelligence researchers, librarians and researchers.

That newsroom input has not always been part of the development process for authentication tools. A July report from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy found that many such tools are built without enough consultation with journalists. Some produce confidence scores about whether an image is synthetic while offering users little clarity about how those scores were reached or how they should be explained.

Backstory also makes mistakes.

When Deck uploaded his headshot, the tool confused it with a photo of another journalist and generated a report about the wrong image. Caulfield described the mistake as “conflation,” a problem that can occur when large language models encounter visually similar images.

There are other limits. Backstory currently works only with still images, and its context-tracing feature can find only material indexed by search engines, leaving gaps on platforms such as TikTok and closed messaging services.

India Today treats the tool as a starting point rather than a source. Krishna said reporters manually confirm information they get from Backstory, and the organization does not cite its AI-generated reports directly in published fact-checks.

The tool also comes from a company producing the kinds of synthetic images fact-checkers increasingly encounter. Google added Nano Banana image generation to Google Earth in July, then said it would roll back the feature while developing stronger guardrails after users shared misleading generated satellite-style images.

Zoe Darmé, a DeepMind product manager, told Nieman Lab that Backstory was not developed as a direct response to criticism of Google’s image tools.

For Krishna, the appeal is simpler. Asked whether Backstory has sped up his team’s daily work, he said: “There is no doubt about it.”

The post Google’s Backstory aims to speed up image verification for fact-checkers appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Fourteen UK news organisations told the National Council for the Training of Journalists that graduates need more than a basic familiarity with artificial intelligence, Journalism UK reports.

The skills employers highlighted include critical prompting, fact-checking, context awareness and ethical judgement — especially knowing how to identify bias, verify AI-generated material and spot hallucinations, according to Journalism.co.uk’s account of what recruiters are asking of new journalism graduates.

That matters because the NCTJ remains a major route into British newsrooms. Its Journalists at Work 2024 survey found that 81% of UK journalists hold a journalism qualification, and 83% of those qualified journalists went through NCTJ programmes.

The training body is now changing how AI is taught and assessed. It says AI literacy will be integrated across existing parts of the Diploma in Journalism rather than treated as a standalone subject. AI will also appear in exams and portfolio work, with students expected to disclose and reflect on how they used AI tools.

The research behind those changes is relatively small. The NCTJ describes it as qualitative research based on discussions with 14 journalists and editors from national, regional, specialist and broadcast news organisations. The published executive summary does not identify the organisations or break the findings down by specific newsroom role.

Still, the pattern was consistent in one respect: everyone consulted was using AI in some form. Some organisations were moving ahead more aggressively, while most described their approach as “cautious innovation.”

The NCTJ also found widespread shortages in AI literacy inside newsrooms. That echoes a separate survey of 448 newsroom leaders across 86 countries, which found that skills gaps and staff skepticism are among the biggest barriers to wider AI adoption. Six in 10 respondents said their newsrooms offered no formal AI training.

For journalism students, the message is less about mastering a particular chatbot than about judgment. The NCTJ says training should emphasize when AI is appropriate, how to verify its output, how to recognize hallucinations and when human editorial control is essential.

Not every student is eager to embrace the technology. A Northeastern University ethics seminar found journalism students pushing back on AI more strongly than their professor expected. But that classroom experiment was small and American; it is better read as an example of the debate journalism schools are navigating than as evidence about UK graduates broadly.

The changes also arrive during a difficult period for newsroom employment. More than 2,300 journalism jobs were lost in the U.S. and U.K. in the first half of 2026, according to a Press Gazette tally we previously covered. But the NCTJ’s own research cautions against drawing a simple line between AI and those cuts. None of the people it consulted said AI had directly reduced the number of journalists in their newsroom at that stage.

That distinction is central to the NCTJ’s approach. It is not asking students to replace reporting skills with AI skills. Reporting, verification, media law, ethics and editorial judgment remain the foundation.

The new expectation is that graduates understand how AI fits around those skills — and, just as importantly, when it should not.

The post NCTJ finds UK news employers now expect advanced AI skills from graduates appeared first on The Media Copilot.

People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel told investors this month that blocking AI crawlers is helping the publisher push AI companies toward deals, Press Gazette reports.

Vogel has previously said People Inc. uses Cloudflare to block most AI crawlers, except OpenAI, where it has a deal, and Google, whose crawler is tied to search. On the company’s Aug. 4 earnings call, he said that was changing negotiations.

“People are understanding the value of our content because we are able to restrict almost everybody from using our content using our Cloudflare blocking,” Vogel said. “And they have to pay for it. And when people have to pay for it, it seems they’re really coming to the table.”

Cloudflare says People Inc. is not alone in using blocking to win licensing deals. Chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen told Press Gazette that publishers are using bot-blocking tools to create “reliable scarcity” around their work, giving them more leverage with AI companies. Cloudflare said it is working with the Financial Times, The Atlantic, Ziff Davis, Condé Nast and the Associated Press.

The idea is simple: content is harder to negotiate over if AI companies can already take it for free.

Cloudflare introduced default AI crawler blocking for new domains last year. Its pay-per-crawl product remains in private beta. The company is now moving toward pay-per-use, where publishers are paid when their material is used in an AI answer rather than simply fetched — an evolution of a payment system we previously covered. Early work includes Ceramic.ai and You.com.

Cohen said crawling was simply the easiest thing to count. “Pay-per-use is a better signal of quality. If you’re scraping something, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re using it,” she said.

Cloudflare says more than half of AI crawler requests revisit pages that have not changed. It is testing with OpenAI a signal for when a page is worth crawling again.

Starting Sept. 15, Cloudflare will change its defaults for AI crawlers. Training and AI-agent crawlers will be blocked by default on ad-supported pages for new sites and existing free customers that have not changed their settings. Search crawlers will remain allowed. Mixed-use crawlers will be treated according to their most restrictive use, which could affect Googlebot.

But blocking is not foolproof. TollBit’s State of the Bots report found crawlers impersonating Google, rotating IP addresses and using residential proxies. People Inc. chief innovation officer Jonathan Roberts has said the company blocks tens of thousands of bad bots a day but cannot stop all of them.

Cohen said another weak point can be syndication: a publisher may lock down its own site while copies of the same work remain accessible elsewhere.

She also argues the model can work beyond the biggest publishers. Cohen pointed to local news, including the Park Record in Park City, Utah, where information may be available from only a limited number of sources. If that information is blocked, she said, AI companies that want it may have to pay.

That helps explain why most Cloudflare publisher customers are moving toward blocking AI bots by default and allowing access for companies with deals — a narrower version of the whitelisting approach some publishers are adopting.

Cloudflare gave the industry until Sept. 15 to adjust. Cohen said the delay was deliberate, because “the goal is not to block.”

The post Cloudflare says blocking AI crawlers is pushing publishers into licensing deals appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Anthropic is offering new details about how it plans to watermark text written by Claude — including what happens when someone edits the output.

The company uses a simple example to explain the technology. If Claude can choose between words such as “overcast” and “grey” to describe the weather, it can make those small choices in a pattern. A reader wouldn’t notice. But someone with the right detection tool could identify the pattern as a watermark.

Anthropic described the system in a Friday TechCrunch blog post answering questions about the plan, which it announced earlier in the week to comply with the European Union’s AI transparency rules. We covered the original announcement here.

The company plans to use SynthID Text, a watermarking technology developed by Google DeepMind. Anthropic also says it will release an API to detect the watermark.

The system has limits, particularly once people start changing Claude’s words.

“Light editing probably won’t remove the watermark completely,” Anthropic said. But a complete rewrite in which every word is replaced would remove it. Anthropic said in such a case, it becomes harder to describe the finished product as AI-generated.

Whether a watermark can be detected also depends on how much Claude actually wrote. If someone gives Claude a human-written document and asks it to make only minor edits, Anthropic said that leaves “very little (if anything) for the watermark to attach to.”

Code presents a similar problem. Code gives a model fewer stylistic choices than prose. Anthropic said it can still watermark choices, including some comments and names within code, but the technology should have “a negligible effect on the actual code produced.”

The company is also drawing a distinction between watermarking and statistical AI detectors.

Those tools look for patterns associated with AI writing and estimate whether a model produced a piece of text. A watermark works differently, using a pattern deliberately inserted when the text was generated.

An AI detector makes a statistical judgment. A watermark provides evidence that a particular system marked the text when it was created.

Not everyone is happy about the change. TechCrunch reported that dozens of Claude users on X said they had canceled subscriptions over the watermarking plan, citing Business Insider.

For news organizations, the technology could make questions about AI use easier to investigate.

An editor could check whether copy submitted by a freelancer carries Claude’s watermark. But competitors, critics and others with access to Anthropic’s detection system could check published work as well.

That makes newsroom policies around AI use more consequential. Publishers may need clear rules about when it is permitted, how much AI-generated material can appear in published work and when that use should be disclosed.

Claude won’t necessarily be the only model leaving marks behind. Anthropic says other major AI developers that signed the same European code of practice are also working on watermarking systems.

What remains unclear is whether those systems will work together. Publishers find themselves checking text against a different system for every AI company.

The post Anthropic says Claude’s text watermark survives light editing but not rewrites appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Gaurav Misra spent about $50,000 to build and run a television news operation for a day, without hiring a single journalist.

About $30,000 of that went to Claude Code credits as Misra, the CEO of AI video company Mirage, built the operation himself. The result was the Mirage News Network, a 24-hour experiment in using artificial intelligence to produce something resembling a traditional television news channel.

The broadcast drew about 50,000 viewers on X and the livestream post generated 824,000 impressions, according to Variety. Mirage paid several accounts to promote the stream, meaning some of that reach was purchased.

The Mirage News Network ran for 24 hours on Aug. 11. Four AI-generated anchors, styled after television broadcasters from the 1980s and given names including “Tom Callahan” and “Marcus Sterling,” delivered stories licensed from Reuters that were already several days old.

Mirage used its Avatar X model to create the anchors, while ChatGPT’s image generator and Google’s Gemini text-to-speech technology helped produce other parts of the broadcast. The humans who appeared on screen came from Reuters video reports and stock footage.

Even the guests were partly synthetic.

Mirage recruited more than a dozen people, many of them venture capital professionals, who allowed the company to use their likenesses and approved scripts for their AI doubles to deliver. Billy McFarland, the organizer of the failed Fyre Festival, was among them.

Mirage does not employ journalists. Misra, a former Snap and Microsoft engineer, told Variety that he instructed the system to follow “general journalistic standards,” rather than a specific set of guidelines such as AP style or the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics.

The company did disclose its use of AI. An on-screen graphic identified the anchors, graphics, guests and advertisements as artificially generated.

But the experiment also showed some of the problems that can emerge when a news operation has little human oversight. At one point, the broadcast incorrectly identified a woman appearing in a Reuters report as President Donald Trump. Mirage later posted a correction on X rather than correcting the error during the broadcast.

Dan Axelrod, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee, told Variety he considered Mirage’s experiment a news delivery project rather than a news network. He called it “a false and misguided devaluing and deskilling of journalism.”

His committee proposed revisions to SPJ’s code of ethics the same week, as the organization considers how longstanding journalistic principles should apply as newsrooms adopt new technology.

Even some people inside Mirage treated the project more like an experiment than the future of television news. Engineer Jason Silberman described it on X as what happens “when the CEO starts tokenmaxxing too hard and spends $50k in a day on a marketing stunt.”

There is also little evidence so far that large numbers of Americans want AI to become their primary source of news.

A Gallup survey released in May found that 7% of Americans said they relied on AI for news to at least a moderate degree. Nearly 4 in 10 said a news organization’s use of AI would make them trust its reporting less.

For publishers, Mirage may be more useful as an experiment in the economics of automated news than as a model for replacing cable television.

Smaller AI-native news operations are already testing versions of the idea. Runtime Wire operates with one human editor and says its system rejects 97.7% of the stories it considers, leaving at least some editorial judgment with a person.

Disclosure is another unresolved issue. Mirage prominently labeled its synthetic broadcast, but research into AI labeling has shown that disclosure alone does not guarantee audiences will notice or understand those labels.

At the same time, the financial pressure pushing publishers toward automation is real. Bauer Media, for example, stopped commissioning freelance fiction writers for Take a Break as it began using AI to help produce stories internally.

Misra told Variety that AI-generated newscasts are “probably inevitable in the future.”

The post Mirage’s $50,000 AI news channel runs 24/7 without journalists appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Robert Sanchez publishes one newsletter covering Arapahoe County, Colorado, on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he turns to neighboring Douglas County.

Every local byline in both newsletters belongs to him.

Together, the two counties cover an area larger than Rhode Island. Other news organizations have multiple reporters covering individual cities within Sanchez’s beat.

His job exists, in part, because OpenAI is paying to create it.

Sanchez was hired as part of a three-year partnership between OpenAI and Axios. OpenAI is funding the startup costs for 13 Axios Local newsletters and providing Axios employees with credits for its enterprise AI tools. In return, Axios allows OpenAI to train its models on the company’s freely available journalism, according to reporting by Issie Lapowsky for Columbia Journalism Review.

Axios announced the first four markets covered by the deal in January 2025: Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder and Huntsville, Alabama. It added nine more this year.

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei has framed the experiment as a question of whether technology can lower the cost of local reporting without eliminating the reporter.

“Could we use AI to basically automate everything you need in a local market other than the journalist and the journalism itself?” he told CJR.

VandeHei has also said “AI will save local news,” an argument we previously examined against the economics of Axios’s model.

So far, those economics remain unsettled.

Axios Local has more than 2 million subscribers but is not profitable, which a company spokesperson told CJR was expected. VandeHei said he would consider the expansion “a great success” if each market became profitable within five years.

Axios expects to operate in 43 cities by the end of 2026. VandeHei eventually wants to reach 1,000. Local reporting jobs posted by the company in early August offered salaries ranging from $65,000 to $125,000.

One important part of the arrangement remains unknown: how much OpenAI is paying.

Both companies declined to disclose the value of the agreement. They also would not say whether it limits Axios’s ability to take legal action against OpenAI. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood told CJR that the terms are confidential.

Axios generally does not disclose the partnership in its local job listings or in stories about OpenAI unless those stories involve media deals. VandeHei said the contract does not spell out an editorial firewall because both companies considered Axios’s editorial independence a given.

One Axios employee, who spoke anonymously to CJR, said the lack of transparency has made some reporters uneasy.

Axios is not unionized. At Politico, employees challenged their company’s use of AI through their union and won an arbitration that led Politico to shut down two AI tools.

The Axios deal also raises a broader question about whether partnerships between individual publishers and AI companies can do much to address the decline of local journalism.

“If you strike a direct partnership with an AI company, that benefits you but no one else,” Matt Pearce, policy director at Rebuild Local News, told CJR. “There’s a systemic problem, and you’re not really doing anything to address the systemic problem. If anything, you’re kind of benefiting from it.”

The first markets also aren’t concentrated in places with the least access to journalism. Aside from Huntsville, which has no daily newspaper, none of the original cities qualify as news deserts under commonly used definitions.

VandeHei called expanding into communities without adequate local coverage “the Holy Grail.” But he said Axios first needs to prove the model can work in established markets.

For other publishers considering similar deals, Axios’s experiment shows both what an AI company may be willing to provide and what it may ask for in return.

Axios received startup funding and AI credits that are helping it put reporters into 13 markets. OpenAI received the right to train its models on Axios’s freely available journalism. But key terms of the agreement — including its value and whether it affects Axios’s ability to sue OpenAI — remain confidential.

That makes the arrangement different from OpenAI’s grants to the American Journalism Project. And whether the Axios model can eventually support itself without OpenAI’s money remains an open question.

The post Axios bets OpenAI money can make local news newsletters profitable appeared first on The Media Copilot.

A PR agency representative offered guaranteed placement on a website impersonating Forbes for $10,000, according to a recorded sales call obtained by Press Gazette. Forbes later confirmed that forbesla.com has no connection to the company and said it is taking action against it and another site posing as a Forbes publication.

The two fake Forbes sites publish dozens of stories a day under bylines with little or no apparent presence elsewhere online, Press Gazette first reported. Reporters Nathan Pine and Liam Redmond appear to have no social media profiles. AI detection tool Pangram classified one of Redmond’s articles as entirely AI-generated.

Press Gazette also reported that Identifai flagged the byline photo of Harriet Caldwell, described by Forbes Liechtenstein as an experienced news editor, as AI-generated. Her articles were also flagged as likely to have been generated by AI.

The sales pitch extended beyond the fake Forbes sites. Baden Bower, a public relations agency that promises clients guaranteed media coverage, was the company whose representatives offered the placements documented by Press Gazette. One representative, Zac, offered placement in the Los Angeles Times, said The Guardian and The New York Times were the only publications where he could not secure coverage, and quoted $9,900 for a Bloomberg TV interview with an Emmy-winning journalist. He also suggested paid articles could help applicants seeking U.S. skilled worker visas.

A second Baden Bower representative, Camilo, said he was unaware of Forbes LA and that the agency works only with licensed regional Forbes editions. He quoted $25,000 for Forbes US, $2,000 for Forbes Georgia and $100,000 for The Wall Street Journal.

Asked whether paid placements are labeled as promotional, Camilo said, “Some are, some are not.” He also claimed Baden Bower has commercial relationships with more than 1,980 publications, including Press Gazette. Press Gazette said it has never published a sponsored article from the company.

Much of the content on the fake sites promotes companies, including Baden Bower itself. One Forbes Liechtenstein article, which Pangram classified as entirely AI-generated, projects that the agency will reach 7,600 clients and 90,000 published stories by the end of 2026 and quotes company leader AJ Ignacio touting its commercial results.

Baden Bower then cites that article on its own website as evidence of its standing, alongside pieces from an AI-generated Philippines edition of Fast Company and an apparent fake German edition of Vanity Fair.

The sites are not new. The Internet Archive shows Forbes LA online since January 2025 and Forbes Liechtenstein since March 2025. The London office listed by Baden Bower has a single contact number, a mobile number that appears to be disconnected.

For publishers, the risk is to the masthead itself. Fake sites can cheaply trade on the authority of established news brands, turning their names and reputations into promotional inventory. The model echoes fake AI news networks built to game search results and fabricated AI expert profiles reaching real reporters, but extends the problem into the PR industry.

Sarah Waddington, CEO of the Public Relations and Communications Association, said the practice violates industry standards on transparency, honesty and earned credibility. Former BBC journalist Omar Hamdi, who first noticed founders sharing fake Forbes coverage on LinkedIn, said the promotional tone of the articles raised his suspicions.

For newsrooms, the simplest defense may be basic verification: check that the publication behind a citation actually exists before trusting it.

The post Fake Forbes sites sold guaranteed coverage for $10,000, PR pitch shows appeared first on The Media Copilot.

The New York Post is putting its founder’s name on its latest push into artificial intelligence. Starting Tuesday, readers using the New York Post and California Post apps will have access to Hamilton, a suite of personalization tools built around an AI chatbot, according to Axios.

The name is a nod to Alexander Hamilton, who founded the paper in 1801. The tools are designed to help readers discover more stories and receive recommendations based on what they read, according to Ariscielle Novicio, chief technology officer and senior vice president of product and digital strategy at New York Post Media Group. The company plans to bring Hamilton to its websites later.

Hamilton includes four features: the Hamilton Search chatbot, the Post Express personalized briefing, the Picked For You recommendation engine and Post Voices, a tool for discovering commentary. Each draws from current and archived reporting produced by the two newsrooms. The system does not generate original stories or make editorial decisions.

The system runs on Google Cloud, using its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini models. The Post sets the editorial rules and controls the product, while Google provides the infrastructure, AI models, search and recommendation technology, Novicio said. New articles are indexed and made searchable within seconds of publication, allowing the apps to offer recommendations based on the latest coverage.

Google Cloud already works with publishers on backend infrastructure, but this marks the first time it has powered an AI chatbot for a news partner in North America, according to Michael Clark, president of Google Cloud North America. The distinction is significant. Google’s Gemini Enterprise platform is moving deeper into newsrooms, providing technology that publishers can build directly into their products rather than simply sending readers their way.

Novicio drew a clear line around the relationship. It is a standard enterprise cloud deal, she said, not a Google News partnership or a content-licensing agreement. The Post pays Google for the technology, and the arrangement is separate from Google Search. The Post’s archive, which powers Hamilton, is also not being used to train Google’s general-purpose AI models.

That distinction reflects how News Corp., the Post’s parent company, has approached AI. It has signed licensing deals with OpenAI and Meta while suing Perplexity over what it says is the unauthorized use of its journalism. Paying for cloud technology to build its own AI products offers a third approach.

The launch comes as publishers look for new ways to hold onto readers while AI-driven changes cut into search and social referral traffic. Some news organizations are responding by building chat and search tools designed to keep readers on platforms they control. The Washington Post launched an AI chatbot in 2024, Time introduced one with its Person of the Year coverage, and Gannett and The Independent have worked with Taboola on generative search tools built around their own archives.

For now, Hamilton has the advantage of living inside the Post’s apps. The harder test will come on the open web, where readers have plenty of other places to ask questions — and little reason to stay unless Hamilton gives them one.

The post New York Post launches Hamilton AI chatbot in effort to retain readers appeared first on The Media Copilot.

Apple is considering spending at least $100 million to license news for its revamped Siri assistant, with publishers paid based on how often their reporting is used, according to Nieman Lab.

Apple has discussed a variable compensation plan that would pay publishers when Siri uses their reporting, rather than the flat licensing fees common in many AI content deals.

Apple already uses a similar model with Apple News+. Payments to publishers are based in part on the share of engagement their content generates on the platform, an approach that has also drawn complaints from publishers.

Apple first announced the revamped Siri in 2024, but its release has been delayed several times. It is now expected later this year. Beta testers at WIRED and The Verge have reported significant improvements, increasing Apple’s need for reliable, up-to-date news sources that Siri can use to answer questions about current events.

Apple is not building the new Siri alone. The company has a deal to use Google’s Gemini models for the assistant, and the Apple-Google partnership has already drawn antitrust scrutiny. That means publishers licensing content to Apple could also see their reporting used by an assistant powered in part by Google’s technology.

Usage-based payments have support elsewhere in the AI industry. Sam Altman has backed micropayments for AI agents as a way to compensate publishers when their content is used. The model could lower costs for AI companies, but it would also make licensing revenue less predictable for publishers and raise questions about how usage is measured and verified.

For publishers, Apple’s proposal adds another model to a growing mix of AI licensing arrangements. Meta licensed Newsmax content for AI search across its apps on undisclosed terms, while Google has changed how publisher links appear in AI Overviews, including by adding Top Stories carousels to some trending news queries. The approaches place different values on publisher content, from licensing fees and clicks to citations and individual uses. For publishers negotiating with Apple, a key question will be how those uses are counted and whether they can independently verify the data.

The potential payments are also small compared with the traffic losses publishers are facing. A $100 million pool divided among dozens of outlets would do little to offset declining search referrals, including a drop among UK publishers

No deals have been announced. The Wall Street Journal reported that discussions are underway, and Apple has not publicly detailed the proposal. The final terms, if agreements are reached, could show how much leverage publishers have as Apple looks for news content to support the new Siri.

The post Apple weighs nine-figure budget to pay publishers for news in Siri AI appeared first on The Media Copilot.