For much of the past year, publishers have been playing defense against AI scraping and copyright uncertainty. But heading into 2026, some see reasons to believe the ground is finally starting to move a little more in their favor.
The Financial Times was the first U.K.-based publisher to strike a licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024. It has yet to agree to terms with another consumer LLM, but Matt Rogerson, FT’s director of global public policy and platform strategy, believes 2026 will bring a kind of reset as big tech companies alter their stance on AI licensing to avoid future legal risk. And he believes AI scraping is reaching a new phase.
“Every publisher has spent the last two years trying to close down all the loopholes, or perceived loopholes, in their website securities,” he said. “There are still gaps. There’s still really no big enough stick to stop entrepreneurs from using scraping for higher platforms to try and get behind paywalls and then scrape content from publisher sites. But I think that the net is tightening [around AI scraping].”
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