What AI leaves out of the answer still counts
Major AI companies including OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon signed content licensing deals with publishers over recent years, but negotiations have stalled for many outlets still seeking agreements. Meanwhile, AI scraping activity continues to accelerate—some publishers report tens of thousands of daily scraping attempts, with Financial Times trial accounts attempting to access millions of articles. This mismatch creates a tension: publishers lack negotiating leverage while their content remains essential to AI model development.
Key points
- AI company licensing deals with publishers have effectively slowed or closed
- Scraping bot activity continues at scale, with tens of thousands of daily attempts
- Financial Times trial account accessed ~1 million articles from 700k IPs in 8 hours
- Publishers blocked most bots but lack leverage in licensing negotiations
Summary and key points written by AI from the headline and a short excerpt, so they can be incomplete or wrong. Fast Company Tech did the reporting; read the original for the full story.
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