Google Tells News Publishers to Share Content for AI Training or Lose Fees

Google is asking news publishers who join a pilot program in which “AI-powered article overviews” are shared in Google News and the Gemini AI chatbot to also give the tech giant broad rights on how it uses their content, The Information reported Thursday (June 25), citing an unnamed source.

Those rights could include allowing Google to use participating publishers’ content to train its artificial intelligence models, according to the report.

Publishers who don’t agree to participate in the program will eventually lose the annual fee they now receive from Google for allowing their articles to be featured in Google News, as Google plans to end that program, per the report.

A Google spokesperson said in the report that “as people’s news preference change, we’ve been expanding our partnerships through our News AI pilot program, working with a wide range of publishers to explore how AI can drive more engaged audiences.”

Google said in a December blog post that it was updating its partnerships with news publications “for the AI era.”

The company added that over the past few years, it formed commercial partnerships with more than 3,000 publications, platforms and content providers in which Google pays for extended display rights and content delivery methods.

“As part of this new AI pilot program, we’re working with publishers to experiment with new features in Google News,” the company said in the post. “For example, we’re testing AI-powered article overviews on participating publications’ Google News pages to give people more context before they click through.”

The European Commission announced in December that it was launching an antitrust investigation that would look at whether Google used web publishers’ content to provide generative AI-powered services to its search results page without properly compensating them or offering them the chance to refuse this use of their content.

On Wednesday, a coalition of publishers of nearly 400 local and regional newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleges that the companies stole the newspapers’ copyrighted news articles, used that content to build and train commercial AI products, and reproduced or repurposed the content without permission or compensation.