Table of Contents
Millions of people now use AI chatbots as a source of news to find quick answers to questions about current events. A 2026 survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which questioned more than 90,000 people worldwide, found that 10% use AI chatbots for news on a weekly basis, a figure that is significantly higher among younger audiences.
The changing relationship between media and tech
Explaining what is happening in the world, why it matters, and what it means has traditionally been the work of journalism. Media organizations send reporters into the field, commission investigations and conduct research, producing stories that help audiences understand global events. But as more people turn to AI tools for information, the relationship between those producing journalism and those distributing it is changing.
Julia Becker, publisher of Funke Media Group, told a panel at the Global Media Forum (GMF) in Berlin according to Deutsche Welle: DW.com that search engines used to index websites and direct users to articles, generating traffic in return. She stated that this exchange has now broken down.
DW Director General Barbara Massing stated in a keynote address at the forum that AI companies draw on quality reporting to generate answers, yet the reporting itself often remains largely invisible by the end of this process. Their remarks reflect a growing worry across the media industry as publicly available news is copied and summarized by AI chatbots while news organizations lose the money and visibility that used to come from distributing that work.
Legal battles and calls for payment
There has been growing concern about how copyrighted material is collected, used, and reproduced by artificial intelligence, and whether the companies that build those systems should pay the people and organizations that created the material. Media houses are pressing Big Tech companies to ask permission before using their work and to pay for it.
In October, German broadcasters ARD and RTL, along with the Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and the Association of Private Media (VAUNET), called for stronger copyright protections for media companies. In the US, lawsuits are adding pressure as The New York Times has sued internet company Brave Softwar for allegedly using its content without permission and getting around its paywall.
Meanwhile, legal institutions in the EU, including the European Court of Justice (ECJ), are examining whether AI-generated answers can themselves infringe copyright. In February, a coalition of media organizations, including the Guardian, the BBC, and the Financial Times, called for rules that would give publishers more control over how AI systems copy and reproduce their content. Massing stated that AI systems should not just use quality journalism, but should also pay for it.
Proposed payment systems
Professor Martin Senftleben, who directs the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, separates two ways AI companies use journalistic material: training their models and generating responses to individual user questions. He explained that payment for training is a more complicated legal question, while the more urgent issue is what happens when an AI system uses journalism to answer a question in real time.
He argued that European copyright law may already offer a way to address part of the problem. Under existing EU law, publishers and journalists may be able to claim payment collectively, without waiting for a new legal framework. He told the forum that Germany is a large member state and this should be introduced there.
Senftleben suggested a legally required payment system in which every AI response that draws on journalism triggers a payment. A collecting organization would gather the money and distribute it among publishers and journalists in the same way music royalties are collected and distributed. Once such a system exists, publishers and authors could use its rates as a starting point when negotiating individual licensing deals with AI companies.
Existing deals and regulatory concerns
Lutz Mache, senior manager of government affairs and public policy at Google, told the GMF panel that Google is willing to negotiate agreements with German media companies and to discuss new AI products with them. Google has also started testing other ways to pay publishers for their contributions to AI-generated answers, such as its AI Contribution pilot tested with selected publishers to reward content that plays a significant role in answers produced by products like Gemini and AI Overviews. However, the program remains an early experiment rather than a general payment system open to all publishers.
Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI have recently stated they support clearer, standardized signals that let website owners state whether their content may be used to train AI models. However, not everyone thinks more regulation is the answer.
Jörg Heidrich, a lawyer specializing in technology law and serving as AI commissioner at the German media company Heise, warned against adding new rules without considering their effects on the wider tech sector. He argued that Europe has already fallen behind in the global AI race and that more regulation could make it harder for European companies to compete with major providers based elsewhere.
Heidrich also pointed to smaller players, including startups, independent developers, and research institutions that depend on access to data to build and train AI systems. He argued that the debate over copyright and payment risks overlooking these groups and that new restrictions could hurt their work.
