According to informed sources, tech giant Google has sent a clear message to news publishers participating in its pilot program. The company is requesting that they share "AI-driven article summaries" on Google News and the Gemini chatbot, and is seeking broad content usage rights.

The core terms of this license mean that publishers must allow Google to use their news content to train its artificial intelligence models. If media organizations do not agree to the agreement, Google plans to terminate existing collaborations, and publishers will lose the substantial annual fees they previously received for displaying articles.

The Power Struggle Behind the Pilot Program

In response to this report, a Google spokesperson publicly stated that as public news preferences change, the company is exploring how AI can attract more audiences through pilot programs. They emphasized that over the past few years, Google has established commercial partnerships with more than 3,000 platforms and content providers to expand the right to display content.

Google said that testing AI-generated article summaries on news pages was intended to provide more background information before users clicked to read the full article. However, this compulsory bundled testing has sparked strong dissatisfaction and questions within the media industry about platform hegemony.

Copyright Storm and Antitrust Regulation

In fact, the encroachment of tech giants on news content has already drawn the attention of global regulators. The European Commission launched an antitrust investigation at the end of last year to determine whether Google used media content to feed its search results without appropriate compensation.

At the same time, traditional media's counterattack against tech giants has already begun in full force. This Wednesday, a publishing consortium consisting of nearly 400 local and regional newspapers across the United States formally filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The lawsuit strongly accuses these AI giants of openly misappropriating copyrighted articles to train their commercial products without permission or payment. This industry struggle concerning the survival of content creators and AI data rights has clearly only just begun.