Five major UK news organisations have banded together with the aim of developing shared AI licensing standards.
Financial Times CEO Jon Slade called for the formation of a “NATO for news” at an industry conference last year.
Now the FT, The Guardian, The Telegraph, BBC and Sky News have founded SPUR: the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition.
They started discussions in response to concerns over unlicensed scraping of content by AI companies, deciding they should work together on potential solutions.
They aim to develop shared industry standards on ways journalism can be used sustainably for AI tools, ensuring this is “transparent and scalable” and protects publishers’ intellectual property.
Guardian chief executive Anna Bateson, FT CEO Jon Slade, Telegraph CEO Anna Jones, BBC director general Tim Davie and Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes have co-signed an open letter to their “fellow leaders in global media” to explain the idea behind SPUR.
They said: “Across the industry, our reporting, our archives, our original content, have become foundational training material for AI systems. This material has been scraped, copied and reused with no common standards to enable permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism. The lack of transparency about how AI answers are created risks eroding public trust in both the news and the technologies used to access it.
“SPUR’s mission is clear: to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high-quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways, while guaranteeing that publishers retain practical control of their content and receive fair value when it is used.”
The coalition is not a collective licensing body and will not seek to set pricing for use of content for AI. But it will look at coming to a view on what pricing structures could work best – for example whether it should be pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference (when outputs are produced).
SPUR aims to influence these types of decisions for the likes of Microsoft with its pilot AI content marketplace, with Amazon planning a similar licensing mechanism.
Publishers will still be able to do their own AI licensing deals with tech companies as many have done already (although the BBC and The Telegraph have not). The Guardian and Financial Times are among a small number of publishers that have done cash deals on AI display rights with Google so far, while both also have deals with OpenAI.
SPUR is calling on more publishers to join the coalition and hopes to attract many beyond the UK.
The news bosses said: “This is a global challenge, and SPUR’s ambition is to be a global coalition. Working across the industry, we can build systems that respect original reporting, uphold public trust, and enable both journalism and AI to thrive.
“Together, we will work with tech companies to adopt responsible, rights-cleared pathways to journalistic content, and with policymakers to build a modern regulatory framework that protects publisher rights and sets clear expectations for responsible AI development.
“Our goal is to help shape a market that rewards original reporting and supports responsible AI innovation.”
The launch follows the suggestion by FT CEO Slade in June last year, at a panel event on which Bateson and Jones were also speakers, that a “kind of NATO for news” would help the industry.
“At the moment, we’re all spending an enormous amount of money, each incremental to last year’s budget, in just trying to hold stuff back,” he told the Deloitte and Enders Analysis Media & Telecoms 2025 & Beyond Conference. “So there’s a good argument for a lot more collaboration around all aspects.”
Publishers who are interested in joining the coalition can contact info@spurcoalition.org. which also aims to set out an agreed way of controlling and monetising journalism used to feed large language models.
RSL is being developed by RSL Collective, a non-profit collective rights organisation led by former CEO of IAB Publishing Doug Leeds and former CEO of Cardspring Eckart Walther.
The technology has been endorsed by some 1,500 media organisations around the world including People Inc, Yahoo! and Associated Press.
