The room smelled like expensive espresso and desperation.
The AI Impact Summit 2026 kicked off today in a San Jose convention center that felt more like a bunker than a tech gala. On one side of the aisle, you had the Silicon Valley elite, looking bored in their $600 cashmere hoodies. On the other, the suits. The publishers. The people who actually pay humans to go to war zones and city council meetings.
They’re finally angry. Or rather, they’re finally organized enough to realize they’re being robbed in broad daylight.
The newly formed "Global News Coalition"—a marriage of convenience between legacy giants and digital upstarts—spent the morning session dropping a heavy ultimatum on the table. They want $5 billion. Yearly. That’s the opening bid for the right to let Large Language Models inhale their archives.
It’s about time. For the last three years, we’ve watched these companies vacuum up every word ever written, digitizing the collective output of human intelligence to build a product that eventually makes the source material redundant. You don’t need to click a link to a news site if a chatbot gives you a three-paragraph summary of a 2,000-word investigation.
The publishers called it "fair compensation." The AI labs call it "fair use." I call it a slow-motion heist where the victim is being asked to provide the getaway car.
"We aren't just data points for your weights," one CEO shouted from the podium. He looked like he hadn't slept since the GPT-5 launch. "We’re the reason your bot doesn’t think the moon is made of green cheese."
He isn't wrong. Without the constant feed of fresh, verified facts, these models turn into digital incest—AI training on AI-generated slop until the whole system collapses into a puddle of hallucinations. But the friction here is visceral. The AI labs are offering pennies. One leaked proposal from a major search giant suggested a "licensing fee" that worked out to roughly $0.0004 per query. It’s an insult disguised as an olive branch.
The publishers aren't just asking for cash, though. They want a "Kill Switch." They’re demanding the ability to opt-out of training data retrospectively. Imagine trying to un-bake a cake to get the eggs back. That’s the technical hurdle. The AI companies claim it’s impossible. The publishers say it’s a requirement.
It’s a classic standoff. The tech giants have the compute and the capital. The publishers have the truth—or at least, the closest thing we have to it in a world increasingly filled with synthetic noise.
One representative from a mid-sized digital outlet cornered me near the catering table. "They think we’re just another API," she said, stabbing a piece of melon with a plastic fork. "They don't get that if we stop hiring reporters, they stop having a product. They’re eating their own tail."
She’s right, but that hasn't stopped the tech sector before. Silicon Valley is built on the graves of industries it disrupted without a second thought. They did it to taxi drivers. They did it to hotels. Now, they’re doing it to the very concept of information.
The trade-off is clear. We get the convenience of an all-knowing assistant that can summarize a complex geopolitical crisis in ten bullet points. In exchange, we starve the institutions that actually went out and figured out what the crisis was in the first place. It’s a parasitic relationship masquerading as progress.
The summit is scheduled to run for another two days, but the atmosphere is already toxic. There’s talk of a "blackout"—a coordinated effort by publishers to block all crawlers and firewalled content simultaneously. It’s the nuclear option. If the web goes dark for the bots, the bots start starving.
But let’s be real. We’ve seen this movie before. The publishers will grumble, the tech companies will toss them a few million to keep the lights on for another quarter, and the fundamental theft will continue. Most of these media companies are so desperate for any revenue stream that they’ll take a bad deal over no deal at all.
As I walked out of the hall, a 20-something engineer from one of the major labs was laughing with a colleague. "They think they can sue their way back to 2015," he said.
Is a $5 billion check enough to save journalism, or is it just a down payment on a funeral?
