The Guardian has joined the BBC, Financial Times, Sky News, and Telegraph Media Group as a founding member of Spur – the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition. The group aims to establish shared technical standards for how journalistic content is used by artificial intelligence and to promote responsible and sustainable licensing frameworks.
Spur's mission is to ensure AI developers can access high-quality journalism in legitimate ways while guaranteeing that publishers retain control of their content and receive fair value. The coalition will work to reduce friction in licensing, identify gaps in technical tools needed to protect intellectual property, and evaluate existing industry infrastructure.
The founders argue that AI systems have scraped, copied, and reused original reporting without common standards for permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism. They say the lack of transparency about how AI answers are created risks eroding public trust in both news and the technologies used to access it.
The coalition welcomes global leaders across publishing, broadcasting, media, and news as founding members. It plans to 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.
