Media
FOR a moment in Marseille, the abstract debate about the future of artificial intelligence snapped into sharp focus. A. G. Sulzberger, the 45-year-old publisher of a 175-year-old newspaper, stood on stage and used a word you don’t often hear in polite business circles: theft.
Not just once, but methodically, relentlessly. He described a world where the most powerful corporations in human history are not competing with journalism, but quietly consuming it from the inside out, like “strip-mining” a mountainside for its most precious ore. The ore, in this case, is the truth—painstakingly dug up by reporters in 155 countries, at a cost of over $2 billion last year alone.
Sulzberger’s speech at the World News Media Congress was more than a corporate keynote; it was a eulogy for a dying compact. He recalled the “so-called open web,” where a tacit deal existed: tech platforms took the lion’s share of ad dollars, but in return, they sent readers. It wasn’t perfect, he seemed to say, but it was a living, breathing ecosystem.
Today, that ecosystem is being replaced by a black box. You type a question into a chatbot; it gives you an answer. You never leave. The publisher gets nothing. Not the ad revenue. Not the subscription. Not even the credit. One study found that OpenAI credited its original news sources in just 1% of its responses.
This is the “murder by replica,” as sci-fi author Margaret Atwood put it—a phrase Sulzberger borrowed with grim relish. The replicas, he argued, are becoming more confident and less reliable. He cited AI models falsely reporting the assassination of a political activist who was alive, and confidently inventing headlines. Yet, alarmingly, a growing number of people find these chatbots more “trustworthy” than the journalists who risk their lives in Ukraine or at city council meetings back home.
What makes Sulzberger’s warning uniquely chilling is not just the threat to jobs, but to social sanity. He linked the collapse of local news to a rise in corruption, a decline in civic engagement, and a surge in mutual distrust. “When a local news organisation fails, people start to hate each other more,” he said. AI, by replacing that shared, fact-based record with a personalised, unaccountable, and often hallucinating oracle, threatens to accelerate this civic decay.
The publisher is not a Luddite. He proudly notes that *The Times* uses AI responsibly to help with editing and distribution. He believes in the technology’s power for good. But he draws a hard line at the “original sin” of taking without asking.
As he concluded, Sulzberger offered a quiet, radical thought. The digital age was built on the idea that “information wants to be free.” But the full quote, from tech philosopher Stewart Brand, is that information also “wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.” For four years, the AI giants have exploited only the first half of that sentence.
The question Sulzberger left hanging in the air in Marseille was whether newsrooms—smaller, weaker, and more fragmented than ever—can force them to respect the second half before the tsunami he predicted finally makes landfall. The answer, he seemed to say, will determine not just the fate of newspapers, but the very shape of the public square.
A.I
June 6, 2026
Tags: A. G. Sulzberger