Can the New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Overlords?

For most companies, spending upwards of $20 million on a single legal fight with an uncertain outcome might mean the boss has some explaining to do. For A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, that explanation is simple: It’s the cost of defending journalism—at the Times and everywhere else.Sulzberger, who took on the publisher role about a decade ago and has been an influential leader in the Times’ much-lauded push into digital innovation, has no shortage of defending to do lately. Nearly three years ago, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies illegally used New York Times journalism to train AI models. That legal case, in which motions are still being filed about discovery requests, is only one front in a broader battle: The Trump administration is waging an ongoing war on press freedoms—most recently with an outrageous attempt to subpoena Times journalists over coverage of the president’s Qatar-gifted jet to be used as Air Force One—while AI companies radically reshape the way people find and consume information online.The Times has arguably never been stronger as a business, having recently surpassed 13 million subscribers, and its newsroom is widely seen among journalists as one of the most stable and well-resourced in the business. Still, Sulzberger believes that journalism itself is facing myriad existential dilemmas—from an administration ready and willing to target reporters, from AI companies whose products depend on the very reporting they risk undermining, and media companies being demolished by the changes they’re unleashing on the open web.I sat down with Sulzberger in late July at WIRED’s offices. We talked about that Times lawsuit, how and where AI is transforming reporting inside the newsroom, and why he thinks journalists and media executives need to team up—even while they continue to compete fiercely. You can read our entire conversation below, or listen to it here.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.KATIE DRUMMOND: AG, welcome. Thank you for being here.A.G. SULZBERGER: It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.I want to get into AI, and I will, but I would be a terrible journalist if I didn't start with news that has recently affected your paper.Specifically, I'm talking about the subpoenas that the Justice Department has issued to several Times journalists about their reporting on the Air Force One jet that was gifted to the Trump administration by Qatar. The Justice Department also issued subpoenas to third-party phone service providers to obtain text messages and phone calls between some of those journalists and their family members.Thanks for starting there, because it’s obviously yet another disturbing escalation in the Trump administration's efforts to punish and undermine the free press in this country.First I should say, I have so much admiration for the reporters who have done this work and who are doing it under a different kind of pressure than we have seen in generations. I think that by any objective metric, this is the biggest effort to go after the press that we've seen from a White House probably since Woodrow Wilson, so in more than a century.These reporters just continued, day after day, to put their heads down, right? Not to get baited by the folks booing them or the folks cheering them on, and just to do their work. That work includes reporting things that the President of the United States doesn't want the public to know because it may be unflattering or embarrassing.In this case, they reported a story, as you said, on the Qatari-donated jet, and it's a little unclear: Was it donated to the Trump administration or to Trump himself? A donation worth hundreds of millions of dollars.Right.When that occurred, a lot of people had questions about whether it could ever be secure enough to hold the President of the United States and ferry him around the world. Sure enough, our reporters found out that on one of its inaugural trips, its first trip overseas to Turkey, there were concerns that it was insufficiently equipped to respond to a threat, that the president had to fly back on the original Air Force One. He denied this initially. But we exposed the truth, which has subsequently been confirmed.Then it gets even stranger.Every administration, we will publish something that the President of the United States doesn't want the American people to know. Upsetting a president of either party is nothing new to us. What is new is that the administration defied many of its own standards and practices and explicit guidelines to very rapidly, in the course of a day or two, serve subpoenas on these reporters. They went straight to the homes of reporters, in an obvious attempt to intimidate them. As you said, we are now learning that they sought to get records, not just from the reporters themselves, but from members of their families. It's a gross overreach.Just to contextualize for listeners, how unusual is all of that? To have law enforcement at your home as a journalist, to be subpoenaed right out of the gate, to have those phone records called up by the Justice Department. How weird is that?I mean, it's extremely unusual. It's very rare. The closest comparison that I have had at the Times in my tenure—I've been in this job roughly a decade—happened in the first Trump administration, when some of our reporter records were secretly seized by the Justice Department. In fact, that led to some reforms in the Justice Department aimed at curtailing that type of abuse.On one side this is objectively very rare—there was similar overreach, you may remember, in a Washington Post case some months ago, where they actually raided the reporter's home and seized her devices—[but] on the other [hand], this is building naturally off of what I think is a broader effort.You have also criticized other media outlets for capitulating to the administration, particularly around settling what you've called winnable cases to appease Trump. Do you still see your peers as largely capitulating?I don't think I ever said largely capitulating. I actually think that the industry has largely held its ground. And to be very clear, holding your ground does not mean an adversarial posture. It means being willing to publish the truth even when powerful people get angry at you for publishing it.It means being willing to ask any question, no matter who it might upset. I actually think that the industry, by and large, has done very good work. WIRED’s done good work. The [Wall Street] Journal has done terrific work. The Associated Press. When the White House conditioned their continued access to the White House on them switching from calling a big body of water the Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico, they didn’t take that sitting down.I remember this.They sued, and I think rightly. They sued regardless of whether they win the case, right?Right.One of the things that I'm saying to peers in the industry regularly is that your rights only hold if you seek to enforce them.You may not win every battle, but the surest way to lose your rights is to avert your eyes, drop your head, and try to avoid notice and just take what comes.I do think that some news organizations have clearly felt the pressure from the administration and I think allowed that pressure to affect coverage.My colleagues in Washington tell me that they're regularly talking to reporters at other news organizations who are saying that they will no longer pursue certain stories, because they're too worried that their editors will kill them because of fear of retaliation, and that their model is actually to wait for an institution like the Times to report the story, and then they'll follow it, and they think that that's a fight they can win. But breaking the story, being the one to first upset the White House, seems like a road too far.That is the definition of chilling, right? That's when the message that retaliation and punishment must be avoided gets down to the lowest levels of the newsroom. Now, my job as publisher of the Times is to make sure the opposite message is getting through, right?After these great reporters were served these subpoenas, I called each of them and I said, “We have your back, and we'll do whatever we need to support you.” One of the things that I was most encouraged to hear in those conversations, although not surprised, these are tough guys, was that they said, “Oh, we're not gonna let go of this story.”Good. As a journalist myself, and I run a publication that takes heat here and there, I worry sometimes about how we better translate that to the audience. So making sure the public understands how essential this work is, and exposing them to the work itself, especially in the context of AI. How do you think about that? What else can news organizations be doing to make sure that audiences are exposed to the work and see and understand the value of the work, and what it means when that work stops happening?Look, I agree that we haven't done good enough of a job as an industry on that. We've sort of taken it for granted. At the Times I think about just the outsize investment we are making on behalf of the public's right to know. We put reporters on the ground in 150 countries last year. Every year, over 150 countries. Last year, we had reporters on the ground in Myanmar, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Venezuela, in Gaza, in Israel, in Russia.In Ukraine alone, we had more than 70 journalists on the ground. And I am sure, although we've never done it, that if we dug in, it's really hard to find the financial case for those expenditures.Yes. I would agree with you there.I am sure, though I've never done it, that when I look at all the investigative reporting we've done, and this is reporting that takes months, sometimes years of work to produce a single story, that it would be very hard to justify all those expenditures, right?But I think the public sometimes doesn't know how much institutions like ours think about the civic good. I really believe, as our Founding Fathers did, and across all their lines of division, the Founding Fathers agreed that a free people need a free press and that a country that aimed to steer itself needed access to independent and reliable information.Jefferson famously said, given the choice between a government without a press or a press without the government, he wouldn't hesitate to choose the press. And that's because this work really does matter to society.Journalism is quite simply very often how you know what you know. Shifting over to AI, it's how AI knows what it knows.Yes, let's get into that. In the context of AI in journalism, I break it into two buckets. For WIRED, there's reporting on this technological moment in time, which is really important. And then there's the separate question, although we cover that as well, of how AI will affect the practice of journalism and the consumption of journalism.I mean, there are really difficult lines to walk here, and I'm curious about how you think about that at The Times.I think my philosophy is you very rarely in life need to be first. There is a risk of jumping too quickly into an emerging technology. And there's probably more risk in that than waiting, watching, learning, studying, experimenting quietly behind the scenes. I think you saw some of those risks, right? Like, think about the news organizations that, in my mind incredibly foolishly, decided to just hand over full responsibility for writing and publishing articles to AI. Mistakes were made.Mistakes were made. And mistakes were published.That is right. And not just mistakes were published, but fake journalists were invented. It was a completely foreseeable and unnecessary set of mistakes. Humans are responsible for everything we produce, period. And there's something about AI that has tricked people into forgetting that it is a tool.Well, it's a very good conversation partner.But when my colleagues say, "Well, what if AI makes a mistake?" I say, "Well, then it’s your job to find that mistake and take it out of your work." You would never ask that about a computer. What if a computer makes a mistake?Well, you gotta find it, right? I view this as a reporting tool. So we're using it much more in reporting than writing, crafting, editing.I think AI is very good at spotting patterns and anomalies in large data sets. In many ways, that's a pretty good summation of a big part of reporting. You know, campaign finance reporting is basically what are the patterns, how is the mix of donors to the Republicans and Democrats changing, big donors for small donors, and then anomalies.One of the reporters who won our first Pulitzer that involved AI-supported reporting, what he said to me is, "You have to think of AI as a filter.”In his case, he was examining bomb craters in the Israel-Gaza conflict, and he said that it regularly makes a certain kind of mistake. So the way to think about AI is it took millions of images and it shrunk it down to thousands of images. But it was his job as a journalist to look at every one of those thousands of images to make sure he felt confident in the findings.So that's the type of experiment we're doing, and I think between that natural posture of, we wanna take our time and move with curiosity and creativity, but also some degree of care and caution, and that we as journalists, as reporters, as editors, are ultimately responsible for the work.I think that's how we've avoided most mistakes.I agree with you. I think it is a very valuable tool, or can be used to create very valuable tools, for reporting and for reporters, especially as newsrooms have gotten smaller. I think there's a competitive advantage there. I will say at WIRED we are building our own AI tools for reporting, and one of the goals is actually to beat The New York Times more often. So we're trying to get clever in ways that maybe other news organizations aren't when it comes to using AI.Everyone needs competition. So we'll watch with interest.But in a speech recently, you also said there are early signs to be concerned about when it comes to how AI will affect fact-based reporting. I mean, some of those are obvious. But talk to me about what you see as those early signs. What worries you most here?It's really important just to go back to what I referred to in that speech as the original sin of AI.There are four ingredients in good AI products: There are the people who write the code; there is what we call compute, the chips and data centers, et cetera; there is electricity; and there is what Silicon Valley calls data but which is content, journalism, books, music, movies.And let's just go through those four right now. On the coders, you literally have contracts that are sports-star level.Oh, they're paid like NBA players. It's outrageous.Hundreds of millions of dollars for a single individual coder at times. Now let's look at compute and electricity. Literally, these companies are taking hundreds of billions of dollars of debt in order to pay for those things. That's how big the prize is if they win. These are companies that all now have trillion-dollar valuations or near-trillion-dollar valuations, right? So the prize is big.Now you get to data, and they've just taken it. They've just taken it all. Without permission and without any compensation, because they thought they could. They think they can get away with it. And if they can get away with that, then that boosts the profit margins of the richest and most valuable companies in the history of humanity. And if the casualty is that it completely guts what remains of our already financially beleaguered industry of journalism, so be it.If it completely undermines the financial models for professions like book writing and music making and movies and TV and academic research, then so be it.That is objectively the wrong thing to do. It is also not allowed under US law. Protections for what is called intellectual property date back all the way to the Constitution, so it is not legal to come in and take all this work.Why does this all matter? Why do I feel some degree of alarm about this? You know it has already been challenging to compete with the giant platforms that basically exercise a monopoly over human attention, right?That's a little overstated, but if you added up all the minutes of a day, a handful of platforms and a handful of companies occupy the vast majority of those, right? But now you're not just competing with companies that are controlling the vast majority of human attention, right? Companies that are actually designed to be maximally intermediating. Companies that feel that AI will work best if it sits in between the user and the content creator.Google is one sort of really salient example here.It's hard to overstate the degree to which publishers relied on traffic from Google referral links and the degree to which that traffic has disappeared in the last year, year-and-a-half, as Google has introduced AI. So now when you search, you get an AI Overview.It's reasonably helpful, usually helpful enough that you don't need to click through. Even just that change has been crushing.And you are suing, you are in a years-long lawsuit. You said recently you've spent, what, $20 million on this legal battle against several big AI companies for copyright infringement. How is that suit going, if I may ask?And I'm curious, what is your ideal outcome from that lawsuit, not just for The New York Times but for the news industry more broadly. What do you hope to accomplish there?Let me first just linger on the number you just said. We are two and a half years into this lawsuit. Two and a half years. And we have spent well over $20 million on this lawsuit, and we are not yet through discovery.I didn't realize that. Wow.Yeah. So when you think about this original sin, this theft of every creative work ever created, it amounts to this immense wealth transfer, right? From creators and researchers around the world to the biggest tech companies in the history of humanity. That sense of impunity that they can just take our stuff is happening in part because of how expensive it is to enforce your rights. The Times, thankfully, we've worked really hard to put ourselves in a financial position where we can enforce our rights.Can you imagine being a small-town newspaper and being able to take on Google or OpenAI or Microsoft or Perplexity.I mean, it's not gonna happen.It's impossible. It's just completely unfeasible. So these companies have been backed into this awful position, where AI companies have already stolen your stuff. They say explicitly they're going to use it regardless, and then sometimes they'll throw a little bit of money your way. What do you do? Do you try to spend what may end up being $40 million on a lawsuit? Or do you accept the pennies on every dollar you spent to create your work just to recoup something?We think it's really important to enforce our rights and say “absolutely not.” Like, you want to use our stuff, that requires permission, and that requires fair compensation.Someone needs to fight that fight. Thankfully, we're not the only ones filing a lawsuit like this. A number of other publishers in the industry have filed similar lawsuits.Our parent company has a few.Silicon Valley has tried to portray our lawsuit as anti-tech.They have.It is not anti-tech. It is anti-theft, and anytime you hear the anti-tech line, I just want you to picture Jensen Huang coming down onto the floor of his Nvidia factory, discovering that Sam Altman has snuck in and has arms full of chips and he's running out of the building.What a visual.And Jensen says, "Hey, you're not allowed to take that." And Sam Altman says, "If you tell me that I can't take this, you're anti-tech, Jensen. You're gonna make China win."We are not anti-tech. We are anti-theft. This is not about money. This is about the ability to sustain essential work.You've talked a few times about our profession, journalists and news executives, linking hands on this issue of AI. Teaming up to get ahead of it, to win. What does it look like to you to compete and team up at the same time? Because we all compete fiercely.Well, who would you say was the closest, fiercest competitor of The New York Times if you look at the last half century? The Washington Post.I was thinking it in my head, trying to be emotionally generous. But that is the answer.The Washington Post was our fiercest competitor. And boy are they fierce.And to their credit, they still are.To this day, there are so many good journalists at The Washington Post, and not a week goes by without them publishing something that I'm just salivating with envy over them having gotten first. So they were our fiercest competitors. They were also our closest ally when our industry came under pressure.Just think about the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times starts publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon White House goes to war with The Times. It is so dark. The threats are intensifying so much that my grandfather, who was publisher at the time, has his entire legal team quit over his decision to publish the stories, and they tell him he may spend the rest of his life in jail.And he starts carrying a toothbrush in his pocket, in case he's hauled off at any moment.The fresh breath was really important?Fresh breath was really important to him in prison. So we publish the stories, we defy the Nixon White House, and eventually we will win the legal case that establishes the right that the government cannot establish what's called prior restraint, keep you from publishing something in advance.We will end up winning that legal right. But there's a period in which we are locked down. When the court has ordered us to halt publication. And what happens the next day? The Washington Post picks up where we left off. And I could give you a dozen of those stories.Our journalists were all kicked out of China in retaliation for some of the actions of the first Trump administration. Who was my first call? It was Fred Ryan at The Washington Post. And my second call was Will Lewis at The Wall Street Journal, and we decided that we would raise concerns about these actions collectively.Let's compete on the stories all day long. Let's compete for the best journalists all day long. And then when our rights are attacked—the same rights that protect me are the rights that protect you and vice versa—we all come together. I think that's the posture we need in the face of these AI abuses.There are things we can do collectively. We can tell the story of these abuses and help the public understand them. We can tell the story of journalism, what journalism is and why it matters, and the danger it faces if these abuses are allowed to continue. We can enforce our rights.How do you win? How does our industry win? Our industry is not gonna win compared to the tech giants. We are a tiny little minnow.Well, let’s say winning is synonymous with surviving.And that's it. What I am worried about, and what you're worried about, and all our peers across the industry, is not about getting giant and bigger. That's what the folks in Silicon Valley are worried about. They want to take over the world. We want an essential profession, an essential service. The act of seeking the truth, helping people understand the world, holding power to account. We want that to survive, and I really believe that democracy needs it to survive.Who else does these things if journalists don't? Is AI going to go to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict and show what's happening there? Is AI going to spend years building the sources that we need to finally get Trump's taxes and provide the fullest picture of Trump's wealth and the conflicts inherent in that.AI can't do any of those things. And so we need journalists for it, and AI needs journalists for it. So we need to come up with a sustainable framework for all of this.And I would argue one that ensures that The New York Times is not the only game in town. You guys need competitors.Look, we are the first to say that.I mean, you are a behemoth.It's interesting that you say that we're a behemoth, and you cover behemoths here at WIRED.You are a behemoth in the context of the news industry.I really want to slow it down. The newsroom at The New York Times, we're really proud of it, has basically doubled the number of journalists that we have to 2,400. That is a drop in the bucket of the number of journalists that this country needs.I could not agree more.We’ve reached this amazing milestone. We hit 13 million subscribers. We're aiming for 15, and that sounds like a big number until you remember that Netflix is over 300 million, and you have another, you know, half dozen with a hundred, 200 million subscribers.Actually it's all the way down the list to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has more subscribers than The New York Times. We are the largest player in our beleaguered industry. But what we need is the entire industry to be much bigger. If you're going to say that The New York Times is the country's leading news organization, do we really think that the country's leading news organization should have fewer subscribers than an anime streaming service?Well, when you put it like that, A.G., I agree. What I want is for a 23-year-old journalist to look at this industry and think, "I could work there, I could work there, I could work there. Or maybe I could work there." There are not enough places to point to.I mean, there are other success stories. I think The Journal has been doing extraordinarily well and doing great work. The Post had an amazing decade and before a couple of really tough years. The Atlantic, The New Yorker. Bloomberg may still be the largest newsroom in America.But there aren't enough. And particularly at the local level. We've seen an 80 percent loss in the number of working journalists at the local level in this country over the last two decades.It is completely untenable, and it is not good for anyone. One of the things that makes me appreciate Meredith [Kopit Levien] so much, she's our CEO, she's the top commercial leader of the organization, and any time she is asked, she says, “I would much rather build a market for journalism than to build a business for journalism,” like a private business.She wants to build up that market, because the more we build up that market, the stronger we will all be. You'll have more talent in the market. You will have more competition for stories, which makes us all stronger.It's also just really important for America. Studies show that when you lose local journalism in your community, basically every unhealthy civic metric goes up. Loneliness goes up, distrust goes up, voting goes down. Corruption goes up.When you've got a strong local news organization, I think about Minneapolis, the Star Tribune, or The Seattle Times, the Baltimore Banner is doing amazing work. You see better civic outcomes. So I think it's important for the industry; it's important for the country.Let me end on this, because we've talked about a bunch of really tough stuff. Crunchyroll will stay with me. What makes you optimistic? When you wake up in the morning or you're going to bed at night and you have a million things to worry about, you have a two-and-a-half-year, $20-million-plus lawsuit among them, you have the Justice Department knocking on the door of your journalists, what gives you hope and optimism for this industry?It's a good question. This feels like a moment of great challenge, of existential challenge for our profession.I try not to force myself to avert my eyes from that. Because you want to avert your eyes from that. But I think the AI challenge, I think the press freedom challenge, I think also the challenge of serving this incredibly polarized, tribalized public—I think of those as sort of the three great challenges of my tenure, and those are first and foremost.At the end of the hardest days, what makes me feel like it's all worth it—and this isn't to sound corny, it's true, and you can ask my kids, because they're always complaining about it—is reading the paper. Just to remind myself, “Oh, this is what I'm fighting for.”How to ListenYou can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.