The New York Times became the first major news organization to take OpenAI and Microsoft, and later perplexity to court over the use of its copyrighted articles to train AI models, triggering a wave of litigation by media organizations against AI companies. Sulzberger warned that these violations threaten the long-term ability of news organizations to continue finding and providing original, trustworthy journalism that the public and the AI models themselves depend on.

Speaking at the 77th WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress, A.G. Sulzberger said that news publishers’ original, high-quality content is valuable for training AI models, but AI platforms’ “parasitic posture” is devaluing it.

“The companies driving AI, already among the richest and most powerful in human history, are consolidating their outsize control over our data and our attention. But they are failing to embrace a core responsibility that comes with that power to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information,” Sulzberger said.

“Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products, a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale,” he added.

Sulzberger noted that the theft is not happening for want of money – the combined valuation of the six leading AI companies stands at $11 trillion, more than three times the GDP of France, with private AI investment in the United States reaching nearly $350 billion in 2025 and accelerating in 2026.

Sulzberger pointed out that it is actually publishers’ original, high-quality content which is “particularly valuable” for building effective AI tools even though AI companies take it without permission or compensation. He noted that five of the top 10 sites used to train some of the most popular large language models belong to news publishers.

Sulzberger said that AI companies are reluctant to offer compensation for their use of publishers’ journalism, which they reductively call “data”. However, he noted that these companies pay for other sources that support their platforms.

“Talent, compute, energy and data are all essential to the success of AI and, therefore, to the success of the tech giants. The first three are paid for, because – of course they are….In contrast, AI companies take ‘data’ without consent or compensation,” Sulzberger said.

The tech giants have argued consistently that they should not be expected to ask permission to use. He said that fair use doesn’t allow this kind of harmful, substitutive copying, retention and regurgitation of a single work, let alone everything humanity has ever produced.

Meta trained its model on an infamous database of illegally pirated books. Perplexity openly defied the longstanding norm that websites cannot be scraped without permission.

OpenAI has lobbied the US government for legal immunity from its seizures of other people’s work. Even Anthropic, often held up for its commitment to ethical AI development, has been unwilling to pay for the high-quality journalism it uses in its products.

“I’m not calling AI or the tech giants that control this technology – inherently bad or evil. I’m warning that AI companies are making choices that violate settled law, threaten the viability of creative work, and appear likely to cause a great deal of unnecessary harm,” Sulzberger said.

The damage extends beyond revenue. Over the last two decades, the United States has lost an estimated 75% of its journalists and more than 3,000 newspapers, with another shuttering every three days.

In the AI era, getting a Google user to click a link is 10 times harder than it was a decade ago, while competing AI models send referral traffic at a rate 96% lower than Google search. A study also found that about 30% of AI bot scrapes violate explicit restrictions on accessing websites’ content, including content protected behind paywalls.

Unlike previous tech shifts where platforms attempted to argue they were symbiotic with creators, Sulzberger warned that AI companies have adopted a more overtly “parasitic posture,” one more akin to Napster, the old pirated music platform.

A top researcher at Microsoft wrote that one of the “core promises of LLMs” is their ability to use “their training data to substitute for the paid labor of those who created said data.” Science fiction writer Margaret Atwood likened the dynamic to being “murdered by my replica.”

“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution,” he told news publishers gathered at the congress. Sulzberger stressed that AI companies cannot be allowed to permanently dismantle the rights that give creators control over their work.

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