内容来源：https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-a-g-sulzberger-new-york-times/

内容总结：

《纽约时报》出版商A.G. Sulzberger近日接受《连线》杂志专访，直言当前新闻业正面临三重生存危机：特朗普政府对新闻自由的持续打压、人工智能企业对版权的系统性掠夺，以及行业自身在数字化浪潮中的艰难转型。他透露，《纽约时报》为起诉OpenAI和微软侵犯版权，已投入超过2000万美元诉讼费，且官司打了两年半仍未进入取证阶段。Sulzberger强调，这场诉讼并非“反科技”，而是“反盗窃”——AI公司在未经许可、未付分文的情况下，大量使用《纽约时报》等媒体的原创内容训练模型，本质上是对创意产业的财富转移。他批评部分同行因惧怕政府报复而放弃报道敏感题材，并指出本地新闻业在过去二十年间流失了80%的记者岗位，这一趋势对民主制度构成严重威胁。尽管挑战重重，Sulzberger仍保持乐观，他每天通过阅读报纸本身来提醒自己战斗的意义：“这就是我要捍卫的东西。”

中文翻译：

对大多数公司而言，为一场结果难料的官司砸下超过2000万美元，可能意味着老板得费一番口舌向股东解释。但对于《纽约时报》出版人A.G.苏兹伯格来说，这个解释很简单：这是捍卫新闻业的代价——无论是在《纽约时报》还是其他任何地方。
苏兹伯格大约十年前接任出版人一职，并在《纽约时报》备受赞誉的数字化转型中发挥了重要领导作用。而近来，他需要捍卫的事情可不少。大约三年前，《纽约时报》起诉OpenAI和微软侵犯版权，指控这两家公司非法使用《纽约时报》的新闻报道来训练人工智能模型。该诉讼目前仍在就取证请求提交动议，但这只是更广泛战场的其中一线：特朗普政府正在持续对新闻自由发动攻击——最近更是以荒唐手段试图向《纽约时报》记者发出传票，要求其提供关于总统那架由卡塔尔赠送、拟用作“空军一号”的飞机的报道——与此同时，人工智能公司正彻底重塑人们在网上寻找和消费信息的方式。
从商业角度看，《纽约时报》或许从未如此强大，订阅用户数近期已突破1300万。在记者们眼中，其新闻编辑室也被普遍认为是业内最稳定、资源最充足的之一。尽管如此，苏兹伯格认为新闻业本身正面临诸多生存困境——来自一个随时准备针对记者的政府，来自其产品恰恰依赖它们所可能破坏的新闻报道的人工智能公司，以及来自那些因自身在开放网络上引发的变革而正被摧毁的媒体公司。
七月下旬，我在《连线》杂志的办公室里与苏兹伯格进行了对谈。我们聊到了《纽约时报》的这起诉讼，人工智能如何以及在何处改变着新闻编辑室内部的报道方式，以及为什么他认为记者和媒体高管需要联手——即便他们同时也在激烈竞争。您可以在下方阅读我们的完整对话，或在此收听。
为篇幅和清晰度考虑，本次采访已做编辑。
凯蒂·德拉蒙德：A.G.，欢迎你。感谢你来到这里。
A.G. 苏兹伯格：很高兴来到这里。谢谢邀请。
我想聊聊人工智能，我也会聊到，但如果我不从最近影响到你们报纸的新闻说起，那我就太不称职了。
具体来说，我指的是司法部向《纽约时报》的几名记者发出的传票，事关他们关于那架由卡塔尔赠送给特朗普政府的“空军一号”飞机的报道。司法部还向第三方电话服务提供商发出传票，要求获取这些记者与他们家人之间的短信和通话记录。
谢谢你从这个问题开始，因为这显然又是特朗普政府为惩罚和破坏本国新闻自由而采取的一次令人不安的升级行动。
首先我得说，我非常钦佩那些从事这项工作的记者，他们正在承受着几十年来未曾见过的压力。我认为，从任何客观标准来看，这很可能是自伍德罗·威尔逊以来，一个多世纪里白宫对新闻界最大规模的打压。
这些记者日复一日，只是埋头工作，对吗？他们不被嘘声或喝彩声所左右，只是做好自己的工作。这份工作包括报道美国总统不希望公众知道的事情，因为这些事可能不光彩或令人尴尬。
在这件事上，如你所说，他们报道了关于那架卡塔尔捐赠飞机的故事，情况有点模糊：它是捐给特朗普政府，还是特朗普本人？一笔价值数亿美元的捐赠。
没错。
事件发生后，很多人质疑这架飞机是否足够安全，能否承载美国总统并载着他环游世界。果然，我们的记者发现，在它首次出行——首次飞往土耳其的旅程中，有人担心其应对威胁的装备不足，总统不得不乘坐原来的“空军一号”返回。他一开始否认了此事。但我们揭露了真相，后来也得到了证实。
然后事情变得更奇怪了。
每一届政府，我们都会发表一些美国总统不想让美国人民知道的事情。惹恼任何一党的总统对我们来说都不新鲜。新鲜的是，本届政府违背了自身的多项标准、惯例和明确准则，在一两天内就迅速向这些记者送达了传票。他们直接找到记者家中，显然是想恐吓他们。如你所说，我们现在还发现，他们试图获取记录，不仅是记者本人的，还有他们家人的。这是严重越界。
为了让听众更好地理解，这一切有多不寻常？作为一名记者，执法人员上门，直接收到传票，司法部调取你的通话记录。这有多奇怪？
我的意思是，这极其不寻常，非常罕见。我在《纽约时报》任职期间（我担任此职大约十年了），最接近的一次发生在第一届特朗普政府时期，当时我们一些记者的记录被司法部秘密扣押。事实上，那件事后来促使司法部进行了一些改革，旨在遏制此类滥用行为。
一方面，客观上讲这非常罕见——你可能还记得，几个月前《华盛顿邮报》也发生过类似越界行为，他们突袭了记者住所并没收了她的设备——但另一方面，这又很自然地是建立在我认为更广泛的行动基础之上。
你也曾批评其他媒体向政府屈服，尤其是在解决你所说的“本可胜诉的案件”以讨好特朗普。你仍然认为你的同行大多在屈服吗？
我不认为我说过“大多在屈服”。实际上，我认为整个行业基本坚守住了阵地。说得非常清楚点，坚守阵地并不意味着采取对抗姿态。而是意味着即使有权势的人因你发布真相而对你发怒，你仍然愿意发布它。
意味着愿意提出任何问题，无论会惹恼谁。我实际上认为整个行业做得非常好。《连线》做得很好。《华尔街日报》做得非常出色。美联社也是。当白宫以改变对一大片水域的称呼——从“墨西哥湾”改为“美国湾”——作为他们继续进入白宫的条件时，他们没有逆来顺受。
我记得这事。
他们起诉了，我认为做得对。不管官司输赢，他们都起诉了，对吗？
对。
我经常对业内的同行说的一句话是：你的权利只有在你去维护时才会存在。
你可能不会赢得每一场战斗，但确保失去权利的最可靠方式就是移开视线、低下头、试图避免注意，然后逆来顺受。
我确实认为一些新闻机构明显感受到了政府的压力，并且我认为这些压力影响了报道。
我在华盛顿的同事告诉我，他们经常与其他新闻机构的记者交谈，那些记者说他们不会再追查某些报道，因为他们非常担心编辑会因害怕报复而毙掉稿子，他们的策略实际上是等着像《纽约时报》这样的机构先报道，然后他们再跟进，他们认为这样的仗他们能赢。但率先报道、成为第一个惹恼白宫的人，似乎是太远的一步了。
这就是寒蝉效应的定义，对吧？当“必须避免报复和惩罚”的信息传达到新闻编辑室的基层时。而我作为《纽约时报》出版人的工作，就是要确保相反的信息传递下去，对吗？
在这些优秀的记者收到传票后，我给每个人都打了电话，我说：“我们支持你们，我们会尽一切努力支持你们。”在这些谈话中，最让我感到鼓舞的事情之一是（尽管并不意外，他们都是硬汉），他们说：“哦，我们不会放弃这个报道的。”
很好。作为一名记者，也作为一家时常遭受压力的出版物的负责人，我有时会担心我们如何更好地向受众传达这一点。确保公众理解这项工作至关重要，并让他们接触到工作本身，尤其是在人工智能的背景下。你对此怎么看？新闻机构还能做些什么来确保受众接触到这些工作，看到并理解其价值，以及当这项工作停止时意味着什么？
听着，我同意我们整个行业在这方面做得还不够好。我们有点想当然了。在《纽约时报》，我考虑的是我们为公众的知情权所做的巨大投资。去年，我们把记者派到了全球150个国家。每年都超过150个国家。去年，我们的记者在缅甸、苏丹、黎巴嫩、伊朗、委内瑞拉、加沙、以色列、俄罗斯进行实地报道。
仅在乌克兰，我们就派了超过70名记者。我确信，尽管我们从未做过，但如果深入挖掘，很难为这些开支找到财务上的理由。
是的。这点我同意。
我确信，尽管我从未做过，但回顾我们所有那些耗时数月甚至数年才能产出一篇报道的调查性报道，很难证明所有这些开支都是合理的，对吧？
但我认为公众有时不知道像我们这样的机构在多大程度上考虑公民福祉。我真的相信，正如我们的开国元勋所相信的那样，尽管存在种种分歧，但他们都同意：自由的人民需要自由的新闻，一个旨在自我治理的国家需要获得独立、可靠的信息。
杰斐逊有句名言：如果要在没有新闻的政府和没有政府的新闻之间做选择，他会毫不犹豫地选择新闻。这是因为这项工作确实对社会至关重要。
简单来说，新闻通常就是你了解世界的方式。转到人工智能的话题，这也是人工智能了解世界的方式。
是的，我们来聊聊这个。关于新闻业中的人工智能，我把它分成两个部分。对《连线》来说，一是对这个技术时刻本身的报道，这非常重要。二是关于人工智能将如何影响新闻实践和新闻消费的独立问题，尽管我们也会报道这方面。
我的意思是，这里有很多难以把握的界限，我很好奇在《纽约时报》你是如何看待这个问题的。
我认为我的哲学是，在生活中你很少需要成为第一个。过早投入一项新兴技术是有风险的，而且风险可能比等待、观察、学习、在幕后悄悄实验更大。我想你也看到了一些风险，对吧？比如，想想那些在我看来极其愚蠢地决定将写作和发布文章的全部责任交给人工智能的新闻机构。错误就这样发生了。
错误就这样发生了。而且错误还被发布了。
没错。而且不仅仅是错误被发布，还捏造了虚假的记者。这是一系列完全可以预见且不必要的错误。人类要为我们制作的一切负责，句号。而人工智能的某些特性让人忘记了它只是一个工具。
嗯，它是一个很好的对话伙伴。
但是当我的同事说：“嗯，如果人工智能犯错了怎么办？”我说：“那么，找出那个错误并把它从你的工作中剔除就是你的工作。”你绝不会对电脑问这种问题。“如果电脑犯错了怎么办？”
嗯，你得找出来，对吧？我把它看作一种报道工具。所以我们在报道中使用的程度远高于写作、构思和编辑。
我认为人工智能非常擅长在大型数据集中发现模式和异常。在很多方面，这很好地概括了报道工作的一大部分。你知道，竞选财务报道基本上就是看模式是什么，共和党和民主党的捐助者构成如何变化，大捐助者与小捐助者的变化，然后是异常情况。
一位凭借人工智能辅助报道获得我们第一个普利策奖的记者曾对我说：“你必须把人工智能看作一种过滤器。”
在他的案例中，他正在检查以色列-加沙冲突中的炸弹坑，他说人工智能会定期犯某种特定错误。所以看待人工智能的方式是：它处理了数百万张图像，并将其缩小到数千张。但作为记者，他的工作是查看那数千张图像中的每一张，以确保他对研究结果有信心。
这就是我们正在进行的实验类型。我认为，介于我们那种“慢慢来，带着好奇心和创造力前进，同时也带有一定程度的谨慎和小心”的自然姿态，以及我们作为记者、撰稿人、编辑最终对工作负责的原则，正是这些帮助我们避免了大多数错误。
我同意你的看法。我认为这是一个非常有价值的工具，或者可以用来创造非常有价值的工具，用于报道和记者，尤其是在新闻编辑室规模缩小的当下。我认为那里存在竞争优势。我可以说，在《连线》，我们正在为自己构建用于报道的人工智能工具，其中一个目标实际上就是为了更频繁地击败《纽约时报》。所以我们正试图在一些其他新闻机构可能没有做到的方面，在使用人工智能方面变得更聪明。
每个人都需要竞争。所以我们会饶有兴趣地看着。
但是，在最近的一次演讲中，你也提到，对于人工智能将如何影响基于事实的报道，已有令人担忧的早期迹象。我的意思是，其中一些是显而易见的。但请告诉我，你认为哪些是早期迹象？你最担心的是什么？
非常重要的是，要回到我在那次演讲中提到的“人工智能的原罪”。
优秀的人工智能产品有四个要素：编写代码的人；我们称之为“算力”的东西，即芯片和数据中心等；电力；以及硅谷称之为“数据”、但实际上是内容的东西——新闻、书籍、音乐、电影。
我们来看看这四个要素。关于编写代码的人，他们的合同简直是体育明星级别的。
哦，他们的薪水跟NBA球员似的，太离谱了。
一个程序员个人有时能拿到数亿美元。现在看看算力和电力。实际上，这些公司正背负着数千亿美元的债务来支付这些东西。这就是如果他们赢了能获得的奖励有多大。这些都是现在估值万亿美元或接近万亿美元的公司，对吧？所以奖励很大。
现在到了“数据”这里，他们就直接拿走了。他们全拿走了。未经许可，也未支付任何补偿，因为他们认为自己可以这样做。他们认为自己可以逃脱惩罚。如果他们能逃脱，这将提高人类历史上最富有、最有价值的公司的利润率。而如果牺牲品是彻底摧毁我们本已财务窘迫的新闻业残存部分，那也无所谓。
如果它彻底破坏了像写书、音乐创作、电影电视制作、学术研究这些职业的财务模式，那也无所谓。
客观地说，这是错误的做法。而且根据美国法律也不允许。对所谓“知识产权”的保护可以追溯到宪法，所以进来拿走所有这些作品是不合法的。
为什么这些都重要？为什么我对此感到某种程度的警觉？你知道，与那些基本上垄断了人类注意力的巨头平台竞争已经很艰难了，对吧？
这有点夸大其词，但如果你把一天的所有时间加起来，少数几个平台和公司占据了绝大部分，对吧？但如今你不仅是在与掌控绝大多数人类注意力的公司竞争，对吧？那些被设计成最大限度“中介化”的公司。那些认为如果人工智能处于用户和内容创作者之间效果会最好的公司。
谷歌就是一个非常突出的例子。
很难夸大出版商对谷歌推荐链接流量的依赖程度，以及随着谷歌推出人工智能，这种流量在过去一年半的时间里消失的程度。所以现在当你搜索时，你会得到一个AI概览。
它相当有帮助，通常足够有用，以至于你无需点击链接。仅仅是这一变化就已是毁灭性的。
而你们正在起诉，正处于一场长达数年的诉讼中。你最近提到，你们在这场针对几家大型人工智能公司的版权侵权诉讼中已经花了，多少，2000万美元？恕我直言，这场官司进展如何？
我很好奇，你对这场诉讼的理想结果是什么？不仅是为了《纽约时报》，也是为了更广泛的新闻业。你希望达到什么目的？
让我先重点谈谈你提到的那个数字。这起诉讼我们已经进行了两年半。两年半。我们已经花了超过2000万美元在这上面，而我们甚至还没完成取证阶段。
我之前没意识到这一点。哇。
是的。所以当你思考这个“原罪”，这种对历史上所有创意作品的盗窃时，它实际上相当于一场巨大的财富转移，对吧？从世界各地的创作者和研究者转移到人类历史上最大的科技公司手中。这种“他们可以随意拿走我们东西”的有罪不罚感之所以存在，部分原因就在于维护自身权利的成本太高了。《纽约时报》很幸运，我们非常努力地使自己在财务上能够维护自身的权利。
你能想象一家小镇报纸有能力去与谷歌、OpenAI、微软或Perplexity对抗吗？
我的意思是，那不可能发生。
不可能。完全不现实。所以这些公司被逼到了这种糟糕的境地：人工智能公司已经偷了你的东西。他们明确表示无论如何都会使用它，然后有时会扔给你一点钱。你怎么办？你是尝试花可能最终高达4000万美元去打官司？还是接受每花一块钱创作内容只能收回几分钱，只为拿回一点成本？
我们认为维护自己的权利并说“绝对不行”非常重要。比如，你想用我们的东西，需要获得许可，并且需要支付公平的补偿。
这场仗必须有人来打。幸运的是，我们不是唯一提起此类诉讼的。业内许多其他出版商也提起了类似的诉讼。
我们的母公司就有几起。
硅谷试图将我们的诉讼描绘成反科技。
他们确实这么做了。
这不是反科技，而是反盗窃。任何时候你听到“反科技”这个说法，我希望你想象一下黄仁勋走进他的英伟达工厂，发现山姆·奥特曼偷偷溜进来，抱了一堆芯片正要跑出大楼。
多么生动的画面啊。
然后黄仁勋说：“嘿，你不能拿那个。”山姆·奥特曼说：“如果你告诉我不能拿这个，那你就是反科技，黄。你会让中国赢的。”
我们不是反科技。我们是反盗窃。这无关金钱。这关系到维持一项至关重要工作的能力。
你几次提到我们的职业，记者和新闻高管，需要在人工智能这个问题上联手。共同合作，争取领先，争取胜利。在你看来，同时竞争和合作是什么样子的？因为我们都竞争得非常激烈。
嗯，如果回顾过去半个世纪，你认为《纽约时报》最接近、最激烈的竞争对手是谁？《华盛顿邮报》。
我刚才也在想，试图在情感上表现得慷慨一些。但这就是答案。
《华盛顿邮报》是我们最激烈的竞争对手。而且他们确实非常厉害。
值得称赞的是，他们现在依然如此。
直到今天，《华盛顿邮报》仍然有那么多优秀的记者，没有一周他们不发表一些让我嫉妒得垂涎三尺、因为他们抢先一步而眼红的东西。所以他们是我们在竞争中最大的对手。但当我们的行业面临压力时，他们也是我们最亲密的盟友。
想想五角大楼文件事件。《纽约时报》开始公布五角大楼文件。尼克松白宫向《纽约时报》宣战。形势非常严峻。威胁不断加剧，以至于我那位当时担任出版人的祖父，因为决定公布这些报道，他的整个法律团队都辞职了，他们告诉他，他可能会在监狱里度过余生。
于是他开始在口袋里放一把牙刷，以防随时被带走。
口气清新在监狱里很重要吗？
口气清新对他来说在监狱里很重要。我们公布了报道，我们违抗了尼克松白宫，最终我们赢得了这场官司，确立了政府不能实施所谓的“事先限制”，即事先阻止你发表东西的权利。
我们最终赢得了这项合法权利。但有一段时间我们被封锁了。法院命令我们暂停出版。第二天发生了什么？《华盛顿邮报》接过了我们停下的地方继续报道。我可以给你讲十几个这样的故事。
我们的记者全部被驱逐出中国，以报复第一届特朗普政府的某些行为。我第一个电话打给了谁？是《华盛顿邮报》的弗雷德·瑞安。我的第二个电话打给了《华尔街日报》的威尔·刘易斯，我们决定共同就这些行为提出关切。
让我们整天为新闻故事竞争吧。让我们整天为争夺最优秀的记者竞争吧。然后当我们的权利受到攻击时——那些保护我的权利同样也保护着你，反之亦然——我们就团结在一起。我认为这就是我们在面对人工智能滥用行为时需要的姿态。
我们可以共同做一些事情。我们可以讲述这些滥用行为的故事，帮助公众理解它们。我们可以讲述新闻业的故事，新闻是什么，为什么它重要，以及如果允许这些滥用行为继续下去，它面临的危险。我们可以维护我们的权利。
你们怎么赢？我们的行业怎么赢？与科技巨头相比，我们的行业赢不了。我们只是一条小鱼。
嗯，我们可以说“赢”就等同于“生存”。
就是这样。我担心的，以及你担心的，以及我们所有业内同行担心的，不是变得庞大、更大。那是硅谷那帮人担心的。他们想统治世界。我们想要的是一个至关重要的职业，一项至关重要的服务。追求真相、帮助人们理解世界、问责权力。我们希望这个能生存下去，而且我真的相信民主需要它才能生存。
如果记者不去做，还有谁会做这些事？人工智能会去乌克兰冲突前线，展示那里正在发生什么吗？人工智能会花多年时间去建立我们最终拿到特朗普税单、呈现特朗普财富最完整图景及其内在冲突所需的消息源吗？
人工智能做不到任何这些事。所以我们需要记者来做，而人工智能也需要记者来做这些。所以我们需要为这一切想出一个可持续的框架。
而且我认为要确保《纽约时报》不是唯一的玩家。你们需要竞争对手。
听着，我们自己是第一个承认这一点的。
我的意思是，你们是一个庞然大物。
你说我们是庞然大物，而你们在《连线》杂志也报道这些庞然大物，这很有趣。
在新闻业的背景下，你们是一个庞然大物。
我真的很想放慢脚步。《纽约时报》的新闻编辑室，我们非常自豪，基本上已将记者人数翻倍至2400人。但这与美国需要的记者数量相比，只是杯水车薪。
我完全同意。
我们达到了一个了不起的里程碑。我们拥有1300万订户。我们的目标是1500万，这听起来是个大数字，直到你想起Netflix有超过3亿订户，而且还有另外六七个平台拥有1亿、2亿的订户。
实际上，往下一直排到Crunchyroll都有。Crunchyroll的订户比《纽约时报》还多。在我们这个困境重重的行业里，我们是最大的参与者。但我们需要的是整个行业变得更大。如果你要说《纽约时报》是美国领先的新闻机构，我们真的认为这个国家领先的新闻机构的订户应该比一个动漫流媒体服务还少吗？
嗯，A.G.，当你这么说的时候，我同意。我希望的是，一个23岁的记者看着这个行业会想：“我可以在那里工作，我可以在那里工作，我可以在那里工作。或者也许我能在那里工作。”现在没有足够多的地方可以指给他们看。
我的意思是，还有其他成功案例。我认为《华尔街日报》做得非常好，工作也很出色。《华盛顿邮报》经历了辉煌的十年，然后过了几年艰难日子。《大西洋月刊》、《纽约客》。彭博社可能仍然是美国最大的新闻编辑室。
但还不够。尤其是在地方层面。在过去的二十年里，我们看到美国地方层面的在职记者数量减少了80%。
这完全不可持续，对任何人都没有好处。让我如此欣赏梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱维安的原因之一是，她是我们的CEO，是我们机构的首席商业负责人，每当被问及时，她都会说：“我更愿意建立一个新闻业的市场，而不是仅仅建立一个新闻业的生意”，就像一门私人生意。
她想发展那个市场，因为我们越发展那个市场，我们所有人都会越强大。市场里会有更多人才。在新闻报道上会有更多竞争，这让我们都更强。
这对美国来说也非常重要。研究表明，当社区失去地方新闻时，几乎每一个不健康的公民指标都会上升。孤独感上升，不信任感上升，投票率下降。腐败增加。
当你有一个强大的地方新闻机构时——我想到了明尼阿波利斯的《明星论坛报》、《西雅图时报》，巴尔的摩的《旗帜报》正在做惊人的工作——你会看到更好的公民成果。所以我认为这对行业很重要，对国家也很重要。
让我用这个问题来结束吧，因为我们谈了很多非常艰难的事情。Crunchyroll会一直留在我脑海里。是什么让你感到乐观？当你早上醒来或晚上睡觉时，有无数事情要担心，其中包括一场耗时两年半、耗资超过2000万美元的诉讼，还有司法部敲你家记者门的事，是什么给了你对这个行业的希望和乐观？
这是个好问题。这感觉像是一个充满巨大挑战、一个对我们职业构成生存挑战的时刻。
我尽量不强迫自己回避这些。因为你确实想回避。但我认为人工智能的挑战，新闻自由的挑战，还有服务这个极度两极分化、部落化的公众的挑战——我把这些视为我任期内三大挑战，它们是首要的。
在最艰难的日子结束时，让我觉得一切都值得的是（这听起来可能有点老套，但这是真的，你可以问我的孩子们，因为他们总是抱怨这个）——读报。只是提醒自己：“哦，这就是我为之奋斗的东西。”
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英文来源：

For most companies, spending upwards of $20 million on a single legal fight with an uncertain outcome might mean the boss has some explaining to do. For A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, that explanation is simple: It’s the cost of defending journalism—at the Times and everywhere else.
Sulzberger, who took on the publisher role about a decade ago and has been an influential leader in the Times’ much-lauded push into digital innovation, has no shortage of defending to do lately. Nearly three years ago, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies illegally used New York Times journalism to train AI models. That legal case, in which motions are still being filed about discovery requests, is only one front in a broader battle: The Trump administration is waging an ongoing war on press freedoms—most recently with an outrageous attempt to subpoena Times journalists over coverage of the president’s Qatar-gifted jet to be used as Air Force One—while AI companies radically reshape the way people find and consume information online.
The Times has arguably never been stronger as a business, having recently surpassed 13 million subscribers, and its newsroom is widely seen among journalists as one of the most stable and well-resourced in the business. Still, Sulzberger believes that journalism itself is facing myriad existential dilemmas—from an administration ready and willing to target reporters, from AI companies whose products depend on the very reporting they risk undermining, and media companies being demolished by the changes they’re unleashing on the open web.
I sat down with Sulzberger in late July at WIRED’s offices. We talked about that Times lawsuit, how and where AI is transforming reporting inside the newsroom, and why he thinks journalists and media executives need to team up—even while they continue to compete fiercely. You can read our entire conversation below, or listen to it here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: AG, welcome. Thank you for being here.
A.G. SULZBERGER: It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
I want to get into AI, and I will, but I would be a terrible journalist if I didn't start with news that has recently affected your paper.
Specifically, I'm talking about the subpoenas that the Justice Department has issued to several Times journalists about their reporting on the Air Force One jet that was gifted to the Trump administration by Qatar. The Justice Department also issued subpoenas to third-party phone service providers to obtain text messages and phone calls between some of those journalists and their family members.
Thanks for starting there, because it’s obviously yet another disturbing escalation in the Trump administration's efforts to punish and undermine the free press in this country.
First I should say, I have so much admiration for the reporters who have done this work and who are doing it under a different kind of pressure than we have seen in generations. I think that by any objective metric, this is the biggest effort to go after the press that we've seen from a White House probably since Woodrow Wilson, so in more than a century.
These reporters just continued, day after day, to put their heads down, right? Not to get baited by the folks booing them or the folks cheering them on, and just to do their work. That work includes reporting things that the President of the United States doesn't want the public to know because it may be unflattering or embarrassing.
In this case, they reported a story, as you said, on the Qatari-donated jet, and it's a little unclear: Was it donated to the Trump administration or to Trump himself? A donation worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Right.
When that occurred, a lot of people had questions about whether it could ever be secure enough to hold the President of the United States and ferry him around the world. Sure enough, our reporters found out that on one of its inaugural trips, its first trip overseas to Turkey, there were concerns that it was insufficiently equipped to respond to a threat, that the president had to fly back on the original Air Force One. He denied this initially. But we exposed the truth, which has subsequently been confirmed.
Then it gets even stranger.
Every administration, we will publish something that the President of the United States doesn't want the American people to know. Upsetting a president of either party is nothing new to us. What is new is that the administration defied many of its own standards and practices and explicit guidelines to very rapidly, in the course of a day or two, serve subpoenas on these reporters. They went straight to the homes of reporters, in an obvious attempt to intimidate them. As you said, we are now learning that they sought to get records, not just from the reporters themselves, but from members of their families. It's a gross overreach.
Just to contextualize for listeners, how unusual is all of that? To have law enforcement at your home as a journalist, to be subpoenaed right out of the gate, to have those phone records called up by the Justice Department. How weird is that?
I mean, it's extremely unusual. It's very rare. The closest comparison that I have had at the Times in my tenure—I've been in this job roughly a decade—happened in the first Trump administration, when some of our reporter records were secretly seized by the Justice Department. In fact, that led to some reforms in the Justice Department aimed at curtailing that type of abuse.
On one side this is objectively very rare—there was similar overreach, you may remember, in a Washington Post case some months ago, where they actually raided the reporter's home and seized her devices—[but] on the other [hand], this is building naturally off of what I think is a broader effort.
You have also criticized other media outlets for capitulating to the administration, particularly around settling what you've called winnable cases to appease Trump. Do you still see your peers as largely capitulating?
I don't think I ever said largely capitulating. I actually think that the industry has largely held its ground. And to be very clear, holding your ground does not mean an adversarial posture. It means being willing to publish the truth even when powerful people get angry at you for publishing it.
It means being willing to ask any question, no matter who it might upset. I actually think that the industry, by and large, has done very good work. WIRED’s done good work. The [Wall Street] Journal has done terrific work. The Associated Press. When the White House conditioned their continued access to the White House on them switching from calling a big body of water the Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico, they didn’t take that sitting down.
I remember this.
They sued, and I think rightly. They sued regardless of whether they win the case, right?
Right.
One of the things that I'm saying to peers in the industry regularly is that your rights only hold if you seek to enforce them.
You may not win every battle, but the surest way to lose your rights is to avert your eyes, drop your head, and try to avoid notice and just take what comes.
I do think that some news organizations have clearly felt the pressure from the administration and I think allowed that pressure to affect coverage.
My colleagues in Washington tell me that they're regularly talking to reporters at other news organizations who are saying that they will no longer pursue certain stories, because they're too worried that their editors will kill them because of fear of retaliation, and that their model is actually to wait for an institution like the Times to report the story, and then they'll follow it, and they think that that's a fight they can win. But breaking the story, being the one to first upset the White House, seems like a road too far.
That is the definition of chilling, right? That's when the message that retaliation and punishment must be avoided gets down to the lowest levels of the newsroom. Now, my job as publisher of the Times is to make sure the opposite message is getting through, right?
After these great reporters were served these subpoenas, I called each of them and I said, “We have your back, and we'll do whatever we need to support you.” One of the things that I was most encouraged to hear in those conversations, although not surprised, these are tough guys, was that they said, “Oh, we're not gonna let go of this story.”
Good. As a journalist myself, and I run a publication that takes heat here and there, I worry sometimes about how we better translate that to the audience. So making sure the public understands how essential this work is, and exposing them to the work itself, especially in the context of AI. How do you think about that? What else can news organizations be doing to make sure that audiences are exposed to the work and see and understand the value of the work, and what it means when that work stops happening?
Look, I agree that we haven't done good enough of a job as an industry on that. We've sort of taken it for granted. At the Times I think about just the outsize investment we are making on behalf of the public's right to know. We put reporters on the ground in 150 countries last year. Every year, over 150 countries. Last year, we had reporters on the ground in Myanmar, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Venezuela, in Gaza, in Israel, in Russia.
In Ukraine alone, we had more than 70 journalists on the ground. And I am sure, although we've never done it, that if we dug in, it's really hard to find the financial case for those expenditures.
Yes. I would agree with you there.
I am sure, though I've never done it, that when I look at all the investigative reporting we've done, and this is reporting that takes months, sometimes years of work to produce a single story, that it would be very hard to justify all those expenditures, right?
But I think the public sometimes doesn't know how much institutions like ours think about the civic good. I really believe, as our Founding Fathers did, and across all their lines of division, the Founding Fathers agreed that a free people need a free press and that a country that aimed to steer itself needed access to independent and reliable information.
Jefferson famously said, given the choice between a government without a press or a press without the government, he wouldn't hesitate to choose the press. And that's because this work really does matter to society.
Journalism is quite simply very often how you know what you know. Shifting over to AI, it's how AI knows what it knows.
Yes, let's get into that. In the context of AI in journalism, I break it into two buckets. For WIRED, there's reporting on this technological moment in time, which is really important. And then there's the separate question, although we cover that as well, of how AI will affect the practice of journalism and the consumption of journalism.
I mean, there are really difficult lines to walk here, and I'm curious about how you think about that at The Times.
I think my philosophy is you very rarely in life need to be first. There is a risk of jumping too quickly into an emerging technology. And there's probably more risk in that than waiting, watching, learning, studying, experimenting quietly behind the scenes. I think you saw some of those risks, right? Like, think about the news organizations that, in my mind incredibly foolishly, decided to just hand over full responsibility for writing and publishing articles to AI. Mistakes were made.
Mistakes were made. And mistakes were published.
That is right. And not just mistakes were published, but fake journalists were invented. It was a completely foreseeable and unnecessary set of mistakes. Humans are responsible for everything we produce, period. And there's something about AI that has tricked people into forgetting that it is a tool.
Well, it's a very good conversation partner.
But when my colleagues say, "Well, what if AI makes a mistake?" I say, "Well, then it’s your job to find that mistake and take it out of your work." You would never ask that about a computer. What if a computer makes a mistake?
Well, you gotta find it, right? I view this as a reporting tool. So we're using it much more in reporting than writing, crafting, editing.
I think AI is very good at spotting patterns and anomalies in large data sets. In many ways, that's a pretty good summation of a big part of reporting. You know, campaign finance reporting is basically what are the patterns, how is the mix of donors to the Republicans and Democrats changing, big donors for small donors, and then anomalies.
One of the reporters who won our first Pulitzer that involved AI-supported reporting, what he said to me is, "You have to think of AI as a filter.”
In his case, he was examining bomb craters in the Israel-Gaza conflict, and he said that it regularly makes a certain kind of mistake. So the way to think about AI is it took millions of images and it shrunk it down to thousands of images. But it was his job as a journalist to look at every one of those thousands of images to make sure he felt confident in the findings.
So that's the type of experiment we're doing, and I think between that natural posture of, we wanna take our time and move with curiosity and creativity, but also some degree of care and caution, and that we as journalists, as reporters, as editors, are ultimately responsible for the work.
I think that's how we've avoided most mistakes.
I agree with you. I think it is a very valuable tool, or can be used to create very valuable tools, for reporting and for reporters, especially as newsrooms have gotten smaller. I think there's a competitive advantage there. I will say at WIRED we are building our own AI tools for reporting, and one of the goals is actually to beat The New York Times more often. So we're trying to get clever in ways that maybe other news organizations aren't when it comes to using AI.
Everyone needs competition. So we'll watch with interest.
But in a speech recently, you also said there are early signs to be concerned about when it comes to how AI will affect fact-based reporting. I mean, some of those are obvious. But talk to me about what you see as those early signs. What worries you most here?
It's really important just to go back to what I referred to in that speech as the original sin of AI.
There are four ingredients in good AI products: There are the people who write the code; there is what we call compute, the chips and data centers, et cetera; there is electricity; and there is what Silicon Valley calls data but which is content, journalism, books, music, movies.
And let's just go through those four right now. On the coders, you literally have contracts that are sports-star level.
Oh, they're paid like NBA players. It's outrageous.
Hundreds of millions of dollars for a single individual coder at times. Now let's look at compute and electricity. Literally, these companies are taking hundreds of billions of dollars of debt in order to pay for those things. That's how big the prize is if they win. These are companies that all now have trillion-dollar valuations or near-trillion-dollar valuations, right? So the prize is big.
Now you get to data, and they've just taken it. They've just taken it all. Without permission and without any compensation, because they thought they could. They think they can get away with it. And if they can get away with that, then that boosts the profit margins of the richest and most valuable companies in the history of humanity. And if the casualty is that it completely guts what remains of our already financially beleaguered industry of journalism, so be it.
If it completely undermines the financial models for professions like book writing and music making and movies and TV and academic research, then so be it.
That is objectively the wrong thing to do. It is also not allowed under US law. Protections for what is called intellectual property date back all the way to the Constitution, so it is not legal to come in and take all this work.
Why does this all matter? Why do I feel some degree of alarm about this? You know it has already been challenging to compete with the giant platforms that basically exercise a monopoly over human attention, right?
That's a little overstated, but if you added up all the minutes of a day, a handful of platforms and a handful of companies occupy the vast majority of those, right? But now you're not just competing with companies that are controlling the vast majority of human attention, right? Companies that are actually designed to be maximally intermediating. Companies that feel that AI will work best if it sits in between the user and the content creator.
Google is one sort of really salient example here.
It's hard to overstate the degree to which publishers relied on traffic from Google referral links and the degree to which that traffic has disappeared in the last year, year-and-a-half, as Google has introduced AI. So now when you search, you get an AI Overview.
It's reasonably helpful, usually helpful enough that you don't need to click through. Even just that change has been crushing.
And you are suing, you are in a years-long lawsuit. You said recently you've spent, what, $20 million on this legal battle against several big AI companies for copyright infringement. How is that suit going, if I may ask?
And I'm curious, what is your ideal outcome from that lawsuit, not just for The New York Times but for the news industry more broadly. What do you hope to accomplish there?
Let me first just linger on the number you just said. We are two and a half years into this lawsuit. Two and a half years. And we have spent well over $20 million on this lawsuit, and we are not yet through discovery.
I didn't realize that. Wow.
Yeah. So when you think about this original sin, this theft of every creative work ever created, it amounts to this immense wealth transfer, right? From creators and researchers around the world to the biggest tech companies in the history of humanity. That sense of impunity that they can just take our stuff is happening in part because of how expensive it is to enforce your rights. The Times, thankfully, we've worked really hard to put ourselves in a financial position where we can enforce our rights.
Can you imagine being a small-town newspaper and being able to take on Google or OpenAI or Microsoft or Perplexity.
I mean, it's not gonna happen.
It's impossible. It's just completely unfeasible. So these companies have been backed into this awful position, where AI companies have already stolen your stuff. They say explicitly they're going to use it regardless, and then sometimes they'll throw a little bit of money your way. What do you do? Do you try to spend what may end up being $40 million on a lawsuit? Or do you accept the pennies on every dollar you spent to create your work just to recoup something?
We think it's really important to enforce our rights and say “absolutely not.” Like, you want to use our stuff, that requires permission, and that requires fair compensation.
Someone needs to fight that fight. Thankfully, we're not the only ones filing a lawsuit like this. A number of other publishers in the industry have filed similar lawsuits.
Our parent company has a few.
Silicon Valley has tried to portray our lawsuit as anti-tech.
They have.
It is not anti-tech. It is anti-theft, and anytime you hear the anti-tech line, I just want you to picture Jensen Huang coming down onto the floor of his Nvidia factory, discovering that Sam Altman has snuck in and has arms full of chips and he's running out of the building.
What a visual.
And Jensen says, "Hey, you're not allowed to take that." And Sam Altman says, "If you tell me that I can't take this, you're anti-tech, Jensen. You're gonna make China win."
We are not anti-tech. We are anti-theft. This is not about money. This is about the ability to sustain essential work.
You've talked a few times about our profession, journalists and news executives, linking hands on this issue of AI. Teaming up to get ahead of it, to win. What does it look like to you to compete and team up at the same time? Because we all compete fiercely.
Well, who would you say was the closest, fiercest competitor of The New York Times if you look at the last half century? The Washington Post.
I was thinking it in my head, trying to be emotionally generous. But that is the answer.
The Washington Post was our fiercest competitor. And boy are they fierce.
And to their credit, they still are.
To this day, there are so many good journalists at The Washington Post, and not a week goes by without them publishing something that I'm just salivating with envy over them having gotten first. So they were our fiercest competitors. They were also our closest ally when our industry came under pressure.
Just think about the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times starts publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon White House goes to war with The Times. It is so dark. The threats are intensifying so much that my grandfather, who was publisher at the time, has his entire legal team quit over his decision to publish the stories, and they tell him he may spend the rest of his life in jail.
And he starts carrying a toothbrush in his pocket, in case he's hauled off at any moment.
The fresh breath was really important?
Fresh breath was really important to him in prison. So we publish the stories, we defy the Nixon White House, and eventually we will win the legal case that establishes the right that the government cannot establish what's called prior restraint, keep you from publishing something in advance.
We will end up winning that legal right. But there's a period in which we are locked down. When the court has ordered us to halt publication. And what happens the next day? The Washington Post picks up where we left off. And I could give you a dozen of those stories.
Our journalists were all kicked out of China in retaliation for some of the actions of the first Trump administration. Who was my first call? It was Fred Ryan at The Washington Post. And my second call was Will Lewis at The Wall Street Journal, and we decided that we would raise concerns about these actions collectively.
Let's compete on the stories all day long. Let's compete for the best journalists all day long. And then when our rights are attacked—the same rights that protect me are the rights that protect you and vice versa—we all come together. I think that's the posture we need in the face of these AI abuses.
There are things we can do collectively. We can tell the story of these abuses and help the public understand them. We can tell the story of journalism, what journalism is and why it matters, and the danger it faces if these abuses are allowed to continue. We can enforce our rights.
How do you win? How does our industry win? Our industry is not gonna win compared to the tech giants. We are a tiny little minnow.
Well, let’s say winning is synonymous with surviving.
And that's it. What I am worried about, and what you're worried about, and all our peers across the industry, is not about getting giant and bigger. That's what the folks in Silicon Valley are worried about. They want to take over the world. We want an essential profession, an essential service. The act of seeking the truth, helping people understand the world, holding power to account. We want that to survive, and I really believe that democracy needs it to survive.
Who else does these things if journalists don't? Is AI going to go to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict and show what's happening there? Is AI going to spend years building the sources that we need to finally get Trump's taxes and provide the fullest picture of Trump's wealth and the conflicts inherent in that.
AI can't do any of those things. And so we need journalists for it, and AI needs journalists for it. So we need to come up with a sustainable framework for all of this.
And I would argue one that ensures that The New York Times is not the only game in town. You guys need competitors.
Look, we are the first to say that.
I mean, you are a behemoth.
It's interesting that you say that we're a behemoth, and you cover behemoths here at WIRED.
You are a behemoth in the context of the news industry.
I really want to slow it down. The newsroom at The New York Times, we're really proud of it, has basically doubled the number of journalists that we have to 2,400. That is a drop in the bucket of the number of journalists that this country needs.
I could not agree more.
We’ve reached this amazing milestone. We hit 13 million subscribers. We're aiming for 15, and that sounds like a big number until you remember that Netflix is over 300 million, and you have another, you know, half dozen with a hundred, 200 million subscribers.
Actually it's all the way down the list to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has more subscribers than The New York Times. We are the largest player in our beleaguered industry. But what we need is the entire industry to be much bigger. If you're going to say that The New York Times is the country's leading news organization, do we really think that the country's leading news organization should have fewer subscribers than an anime streaming service?
Well, when you put it like that, A.G., I agree. What I want is for a 23-year-old journalist to look at this industry and think, "I could work there, I could work there, I could work there. Or maybe I could work there." There are not enough places to point to.
I mean, there are other success stories. I think The Journal has been doing extraordinarily well and doing great work. The Post had an amazing decade and before a couple of really tough years. The Atlantic, The New Yorker. Bloomberg may still be the largest newsroom in America.
But there aren't enough. And particularly at the local level. We've seen an 80 percent loss in the number of working journalists at the local level in this country over the last two decades.
It is completely untenable, and it is not good for anyone. One of the things that makes me appreciate Meredith [Kopit Levien] so much, she's our CEO, she's the top commercial leader of the organization, and any time she is asked, she says, “I would much rather build a market for journalism than to build a business for journalism,” like a private business.
She wants to build up that market, because the more we build up that market, the stronger we will all be. You'll have more talent in the market. You will have more competition for stories, which makes us all stronger.
It's also just really important for America. Studies show that when you lose local journalism in your community, basically every unhealthy civic metric goes up. Loneliness goes up, distrust goes up, voting goes down. Corruption goes up.
When you've got a strong local news organization, I think about Minneapolis, the Star Tribune, or The Seattle Times, the Baltimore Banner is doing amazing work. You see better civic outcomes. So I think it's important for the industry; it's important for the country.
Let me end on this, because we've talked about a bunch of really tough stuff. Crunchyroll will stay with me. What makes you optimistic? When you wake up in the morning or you're going to bed at night and you have a million things to worry about, you have a two-and-a-half-year, $20-million-plus lawsuit among them, you have the Justice Department knocking on the door of your journalists, what gives you hope and optimism for this industry?
It's a good question. This feels like a moment of great challenge, of existential challenge for our profession.
I try not to force myself to avert my eyes from that. Because you want to avert your eyes from that. But I think the AI challenge, I think the press freedom challenge, I think also the challenge of serving this incredibly polarized, tribalized public—I think of those as sort of the three great challenges of my tenure, and those are first and foremost.
At the end of the hardest days, what makes me feel like it's all worth it—and this isn't to sound corny, it's true, and you can ask my kids, because they're always complaining about it—is reading the paper. Just to remind myself, “Oh, this is what I'm fighting for.”
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