L

Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 7 July 2025

Debate

Artificial Intelligence: News Media

Contribution

My Lords, AI poses an existential threat to independent media because of the way it scrapes their high-quality content without either attribution or payment to those who created it, which is an act of theft directly threatening the provision of quality news and the jobs of thousands of reporters. Is the Minister aware that research by market leader Cloudflare shows that, for example, for every 73,000 pages of content scraped by Anthropic’s AI crawlers from news providers, there is just one single referral back to publishers’ websites? Does she realise that without this vital traffic, publishers cannot sell advertising or subscriptions, and their businesses become unsustainable? The free press cannot wait years for copyright reform because there is nothing left to protect. We were promised immediate action on this issue when the data Act went through; when will we get some of it?

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