New York Times, AFP, The Economist and The Atlantic join SPUR, the publishers’ AI-licensing standards coalition, which reaches 80 members
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- 13 October 2026
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Key facts
- Announced Monday, Oct 12, 2026: 40+ new members; SPUR now counts 80 members (publishers and publishing associations) in more than 20 countries (Press Gazette, Oct 13)
- New members named by Press Gazette include The New York Times, AFP, The Economist, The Atlantic, ITV News, The Observer, DPG Media, FUNKE Mediengruppe, NZZ, Radio France, L’Equipe, The Canadian Press, Stuff, Hong Kong Free Press, Quanta Magazine and the Simons Foundation, plus associations such as BDZV (Germany), ANJ (Brazil), Nihon Shinbun Kyokai (Japan), the News Media Association (UK), INMA and IAPA; Press Gazette itself joined as an associate member
- SPUR was launched in February 2026 by The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the BBC and Sky News; Mediahuis, the Associated Press (July) and CMA Media were added later as founding members (Press Gazette)
- Earlier in October SPUR released an open-source content telemetry standard, v1.0, meant to track AI scraping, grounding, citation in AI answers, display and user engagement (Press Gazette). A draft had gone through a public consultation that closed in July (Independent Media Association, Aug 6)
- Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, New York Times SVP of strategic partnerships: ‘Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist.’ SPUR co-founder David Buttle: ‘We can’t simply hope for the best when it comes to AI companies and the future of publishing.’
- SPUR says it will not set prices; the standard is meant to measure use so that licensing deals can be negotiated (Startup Fortune). According to Digiday, as cited by Startup Fortune, SPUR invited OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and Microsoft to help shape the standard; none has publicly committed to adopting it
- In August SPUR said it had held discussions with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral and with Cloudflare and Fastly, had run its first threat-intelligence exercises against scrapers, and was close to becoming an industry-owned non-profit legal entity (Independent Media Association)
- Context: The New York Times has one AI licensing deal (Amazon, May 2025) and is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity (Press Gazette)
What happened
SPUR, founded in February 2026 by five British news organisations, added more than 40 members on Oct 12, 2026. The best-known are The New York Times, AFP, The Economist and The Atlantic. The coalition does not negotiate prices. It writes shared technical standards so that publishers can see how AI systems retrieve, ground on, cite and display their content, and can use those measurements in licensing talks. Version 1.0 of its content telemetry standard was published earlier in October.
Earlier steps: about 30 publishers joined in June at the World News Media Congress in Marseille, and the Associated Press joined in July as a founding member. This entry is the first in the dataset on SPUR; the February launch and the June expansion have no entries of their own.
Why it matters
Publishers have so far dealt with AI companies one by one, through lawsuits or private deals. A standard backed by 80 organisations, including a publisher that is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, is an attempt to set common terms for the whole industry. No AI company has said it will adopt the standard.
Sources
5 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 5 press
Press
- Press Gazette: New York Times among surge of sign-ups to publisher AI coalition SPUR (Oct 13)pressgazette.co.uk, press
- Startup Fortune: NYT, AFP and The Economist join SPUR coalition to make AI pay for news (Oct 13)startupfortune.com, press
- Independent Media Association: SPUR expands global publisher coalition as work accelerates on AI standards (Aug 6)ima.press, press
- Press Gazette: AI licensing coalition SPUR in huge expansion (June 2026)pressgazette.co.uk, press
- The Media Leader: New York Times, Observer, Economist, ITV News among 40 new members to join SPUR Coalition (not read directly)uk.themedialeader.com, press
Changes
- Filed. Reuters’ report of the announcement was not readable; details are from Press Gazette, Startup Fortune and the Independent Media Association