As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally reshaping our information ecosystems, public interest media faces historical challenges regarding its sustainability. Facilitated by the Forum on Information and Democracy and led by Luxembourg, Spain and Ukraine, the Workstream on Safeguarding Access to Reliable Information in the Age of AI held its second meeting highlighting this specific challenge and possible policy responses.
On 18 June 2026, the Forum on Information and Democracy held the second meeting of its workstream on Safeguarding access to reliable information in the age of AI. On this occasion, María González Veracruz, Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence of Spain, announced that the country was joining Luxembourg and Ukraine in the co-chairship of the workstream. As she noted,
“False content is easy to spread and difficult to disprove…international cooperation is essential for the overarching goal of protecting information integrity, trust, and democracy.”
Gathering representatives of signatory States of the Partnership as well as civil society experts and researchers, the first part of the meeting highlighted the detrimental impact of AI on the economic model of media.
The second half of the meeting focused on policy responses to establish fair remuneration and licensing schemes, building on some approaches in the UK and in Italy.
Camille Grenier, Executive Director of the Forum on Information and Democracy, highlighted the importance for the media community to be involved in AI Governance spaces.
“As discussions on AI Governance move forward, we believe that our workstream can play a meaningful role in elevating the specific impact of this technology on public interest media. This is the reason we are engaging with the UN AI Global Dialogue to be held in Geneva on 6-7 July.”
The next meeting of the Workstream, to be held in September 2026, will more specifically focus on epistemic risks due to AI and will base its discussion on the results of an international survey prepared by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and the FID. All stakeholders are invited to contribute to this work.
Key Insights
How does AI affect fair remuneration to news media?
- Evidence shows that AI-based summaries of the news reduce traffic, and hence revenue, to online news websites.
- Big tech companies use exceptions in IP law, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, to ingest training data for their proprietary models. They then use the same copyright protections to secure the value they generate using public information.
- Ad spending and algorithms decide what information is amplified, and hence monetized and funded online. This gradually disincentivises and marginalizes high-value, trustworthy news.
Concrete cases to rebalance the power asymmetry
- Litigation on copyright: in Meta v. AGCOM, the Court of Justice of the European Union emphasised that publishers’ rights under the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) are exclusive.
- Competition law: In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority imposed conduct requirements on Google, including to provide information on how publishers’ content is used to fuel generative AI features and ensure that content is attributed and links back to the publisher’s original sites.
Both these cases point to an emerging trend of regulated contractual freedoms, where publisher rights are placed front and centre even as tech companies are free to use their content within their products. However, how remuneration must be calculated, and how bargaining must take place are still open questions.
The case of licensing regimes
Licensing is a much discussed solution and can be helpful in several contexts.
However, specific attention should be paid to the following:
- Larger outlets are in a unique bargaining position to gain licensing deals and safeguard their revenues, which puts smaller, more local news media outlets frequently serving underserved areas or ‘news deserts’ at a disadvantage. These media deals are overwhelmingly concentrated in the US and the EU, leaving the rest of the world far behind.
- Those remedial policies focused exclusively on compensation, rights-holding and licensing to news media organizations will affect populations, overwhelmingly in the Global South, who cannot afford subscription fees and may be priced out of a reliable information ecosystem.
What other solutions remain available?
- Publishers can include ‘do not crawl’ signals in their work.
- They can engage in individual licensing deals and collective bargaining in tandem – these are not mutually exclusive.
- Working with national organizations pushing for policies and safeguards is also helpful.
- Information integrity and transparency principles must be embedded in national law, regulation and multilateral agreements, and states must engage in international declarations and initiatives.
- Policymakers must encourage building lightweight, local AI tools for underserved populations and languages, as opposed to viewing large-scale indigenous frontier models as the only solution.
- Because AI’s future impact is uncertain, policy should not assume a single predetermined model.
- Press aid initiatives can be helpful to create conditions for independent journalists to produce reliable information, thus treating journalism as a public good.
- Reliable journalistic content must be identifiable and trustworthy even when mediated through AI systems.
- According to some experts, in certain contexts, the conversation could move beyond copyright and compensation towards the much larger goal of protecting knowledge infrastructures as part of cultural commons.
