At the Axios Media Trends Live event on Thursday, AP President and CEO Daisy Veerasingham discussed the most important issues facing the news industry, including the global news organization’s industry-leading efforts in the AI content licensing space.
“We established two principles right at the beginning of this and the two principles are what’s helped guide our decision making — even to this day,” Veerasingham said during a live interview with Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer.
“And those two principles were: [first] our intellectual property has to be protected. Why is that important? Because we put journalists on the frontlines every single day. We’ve just talked about the huge number of risks that come with that. And that’s why we have to protect our intellectual property and [second] we have to achieve a fair value for that.”
AP announced a collaboration with OpenAI in 2023, the first news organization to do so. The news organization in January also expanded its longstanding relationship with Google to deliver AP’s fact-based journalism on Google’s Gemini app, a Google AI offering.
“We’re a licensing business so we have a good framework … I think it is really important where those two principles can be respected — that you get independent fact-based and nonpartisan journalism information or content into the training of these algorithms,” Veerasingham said. “That is an absolute fundamental. We are talking about huge amounts of misinformation already and that’s only going to get exacerbated and I do think that’s one of the reasons they do want to work with us because they understand the value.”
Veerasingham also discussed the importance of press freedom, journalist safety and the AP Fund for Journalism, the charitable sister organization created by The Associated Press in 2024 to support public service journalism and make it accessible to state and local news organizations in the U.S.
Watch a recording of the full conversation here.
