SPUR: Media Cartel Against AI Scrapers

On February 26, 2026, the world's largest publishers — BBC, Financial Times, Sky News, Telegraph, and The Guardian — announced the creation of the SPUR coalition. The goal of the alliance is to develop unified, strict standards for licensing journalistic content for artificial intelligence training.

The era of free internet scraping is over. Individual lawsuits (like the New York Times case) proved to be too slow, so media outlets have shifted to union tactics. SPUR is forming a kind of information cartel that will act as a united front in negotiations with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Publishers demand transparent model training logs and fixed royalties for the use of their intellectual property. If Big Tech refuses to pay, it risks facing a collective paywall and the degradation of their LLMs' answer quality on current topics.

Source: The Guardian