The A.G. Sulzberger Interview: Fighting for Journalism’s Future Against Trump, AI, and Big Tech

For most companies, spending more than $20 million on a single high-stakes legal battle with an uncertain outcome would demand major accountability from leadership. For A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, that explanation is straightforward: this is the price of defending journalism—both at the Times and across the entire industry.

Sulzberger, who took the publisher role roughly a decade ago and led the outlet’s widely celebrated shift into digital innovation, has no shortage of fights to wage these days. Nearly three years ago, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging the companies illegally scraped decades of Times reporting to train generative AI models. The case remains in early procedural stages, with ongoing disputes over discovery requests, and it is just one front in a much larger war: the second Trump administration has waged a sustained assault on press freedom—most recently with the shocking subpoena of multiple Times reporters over their coverage of a Qatar-gifted jet earmarked for use as Air Force One—even as AI companies upend how people discover and consume news online.

Financially, the Times is stronger than it has ever been, recently crossing 13 million global subscribers, and its newsroom is widely regarded as one of the most stable, well-funded outlets in the industry. Even so, Sulzberger argues journalism as a whole faces a cascade of existential threats: from an administration openly targeting reporters, to AI firms whose products are built on original reporting that they are slowly destroying, to legacy media outlets crumbling amid the chaos AI has unleashed on the open web.

I sat down with Sulzberger at WIRED’s offices in late July to discuss the Times’ lawsuit, how AI is reshaping day-to-day reporting inside the newsroom, and why he believes journalists and media leaders must collaborate—even as they compete fiercely for scoops and readers. The full conversation is below, or you can listen to the full audio here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Katie Drummond: A.G., welcome. Thank you for being here.

A.G. Sulzberger: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

KD: I do want to dive into AI, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t open with the recent news that directly impacted your paper: specifically, the subpoenas the Justice Department issued to several Times reporters over their coverage of the Air Force One jet gifted to the Trump administration by Qatar. The DOJ also subpoenaed third-party phone providers to obtain text messages and call records between those reporters and their family members.

AGS: Thank you for leading with this, because it’s just the latest disturbing escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign to punish and weaken the free press in this country. First off, I have so much admiration for the reporters who did this work, who are carrying it out under a level of pressure we haven’t seen in generations. By any objective measure, this is the most aggressive assault on the press from a White House we’ve seen in more than a century—probably not since Woodrow Wilson.

These reporters just keep showing up every day, heads down. They don’t take the bait from critics or even cheerleaders, they just do their jobs. That work means reporting things the sitting president doesn’t want the public to see, because it’s unflattering or embarrassing. In this case, they broke the story of that hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar Qatari jet donation—there’s still ambiguity over whether it was donated to the Trump administration or to Trump personally. A lot of people immediately had questions about whether the jet could ever be made secure enough to transport the president around the world.

Sure enough, our reporters found that on its very first overseas trip to Turkey, there were credible concerns that it wasn’t properly equipped to respond to a security threat, and the president ended up flying back on the original Air Force One. Trump initially denied it, but we exposed the truth, and that reporting has since been confirmed.

Then things get even stranger. Every administration has disliked stories we publish that they don’t want the public to see. Upsetting a president from either party is nothing new for us. What’s new here is that the administration threw out longstanding internal standards, practices, and explicit guidelines to serve these subpoenas to reporters incredibly rapidly, over the course of just a day or two. They showed up directly at reporters’ homes, in an obvious attempt to intimidate them. And as you noted, they didn’t just go after the reporters’ records—they tried to get records from reporters’ family members too. This is a massive, gross overreach.

KD: For context for our listeners, how unusual is all of this? For law enforcement to show up at a journalist’s home, to issue subpoenas this quickly out the gate, to demand these phone records from the DOJ. How unprecedented is this?

AGS: It’s extremely unusual. It’s very rare. The closest parallel I’ve seen at the Times during my tenure—I’ve been in this role roughly a decade—was during the first Trump administration, when the DOJ secretly seized records from some of our reporters. That actually led to DOJ reforms meant to curb that kind of abuse.

On one hand, this is objectively very rare—you may remember a similar overreach a few months back with a Washington Post reporter, where they actually raided her home and seized her devices. On the other hand, this is just the latest step in a much broader, ongoing campaign.

KD: You’ve criticized other media outlets for capitulating to this administration, specifically for settling cases you’ve called winnable just to appease Trump. Do you still see most of your peers caving to pressure?

AGS: I never said most were capitulating. I actually think the industry as a whole has largely held its ground. And to be clear, holding ground doesn’t mean taking an adversarial posture for the sake of it. It means being willing to publish the truth even when powerful people are angry at you for it. It means being willing to ask any question, no matter who it upsets. And I actually think the industry has done really good work, by and large. WIRED does good work. The Wall Street Journal does terrific work. The AP does too. When the White House tried to force them to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America to keep their press access, they didn’t just accept it. I remember that. They sued, and they were right to. It doesn’t even matter if they win the case, right?

Right. One of the things I tell my peers in the industry all the time is that your rights only mean something if you’re willing to enforce them. You won’t win every battle, but the surest way to lose your rights for good is to look away, keep your head down, avoid attention, and just accept whatever happens.

I do think some news organizations have clearly felt the administration’s pressure and allowed that pressure to shape their coverage. My colleagues in D.C. tell me they regularly talk to reporters at other outlets who say they won’t pursue certain stories anymore—they’re too worried their editors will kill it out of fear of retaliation. Their strategy is to wait for an outlet like the Times to break the story first, then they follow it. That’s a fight they think they can win. But breaking the story, being the one to anger the White House first? That’s a bridge too far.

That’s the definition of a chilling effect. That’s when the message that you have to avoid retaliation and punishment seeps all the way down to the lowest levels of the newsroom. My job as Times publisher is to send the opposite message. After these great reporters got their subpoenas, I called each one personally and told them: We have your back, we will do whatever it takes to support you. What I was most encouraged to hear—though it didn’t surprise me, these are tough reporters—was that they all said they weren’t dropping the story.

KD: Good. As a journalist myself, I run a publication that gets heat regularly, and I often worry about how we communicate the value of this work to audiences. How do we make sure the public understands how essential this is, especially in the age of AI? What more can news organizations do to make sure audiences see our work, understand its value, and grasp what’s lost when that work disappears?

AGS: I agree, the industry as a whole has not done a good enough job at this. We’ve taken it for granted for too long. At the Times, I think about the enormous investment we make on behalf of the public’s right to know. Last year, we had reporters on the ground in 150 countries. Every year, that number stays above 150. Last year, we had reporters in Myanmar, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, Israel, Russia. Just in Ukraine, we had more than 70 reporters on the ground. I can guarantee you, if we crunched the numbers, it’s almost impossible to make a purely financial case for those expenditures. Yeah, that’s right. I’m sure if I looked at all our investigative work—work that takes months, sometimes years, to produce a single story—it would be very hard to justify all that spending on paper. But the public rarely sees how much institutions like ours prioritize the civic good of this work.

I really believe, just like the Founding Fathers did—even with all their divides, they agreed that a free people need a free press. A country that governs itself needs access to independent, reliable information. Jefferson famously said if he had to choose between a government without a press or a press without a government, he’d pick the press without hesitation. That’s because this work matters to society. Quite simply, journalism is how you know what you know.

KD: Shifting to AI: this is how AI knows what it knows, too. Let’s dive in. When I think about AI and journalism, I split it into two buckets. First, there’s reporting on this technological moment, which is critical. Then there’s the separate question of how AI changes the actual practice and consumption of journalism. There are really tricky lines to walk here, and I’m curious how the Times is approaching this.

AGS: My philosophy is that you very rarely need to be first in life. Jumping too fast into an emerging technology carries real risk. I think there’s more risk in rushing than there is in waiting, watching, learning, experimenting quietly behind closed doors. You saw those risks play out already, right? Think about the news organizations that, in my view incredibly foolishly, just handed over full responsibility for writing and publishing articles to AI. Mistakes happened.

Mistakes got published. Exactly. And not just mistakes—they made up fake journalists entirely. It was a completely avoidable, totally foreseeable set of errors. Humans are responsible for everything we publish, full stop. There’s something about AI that’s made people forget it’s just a tool. It can be a really good conversation partner. But when my colleagues ask, “What if AI makes a mistake?” I say, “Well, then it’s your job to find that mistake and remove it from your work.” You’d never ask that question about a regular computer: “What if the computer makes a mistake?” Of course it can—you just find the error and fix it.

I see AI as a reporting tool first. We use it far more for reporting than for writing, drafting, or editing. AI is really good at spotting patterns and anomalies in huge datasets. That’s actually a pretty good summary of a huge part of what reporting is. Take campaign finance reporting: it’s all about looking at patterns, how donor demographics for Republicans and Democrats are shifting, big donors vs small donors, and then flagging anomalies.

One of our reporters who won our first Pulitzer for AI-assisted reporting told me: “You have to think of AI as a filter.” In his case, he was analyzing bomb craters in the Israel-Gaza conflict, and he said AI regularly makes a specific type of error. So AI takes millions of images and shrinks that down to thousands of potentially relevant images. But it was his job as a journalist to look at every single one of those thousands of images to confirm the findings. That’s the kind of experimentation we’re doing. We take our time, move with curiosity and creativity but also care and caution, and we always remember that journalists, reporters, editors are ultimately responsible for the work. That approach has helped us avoid most of the mistakes other outlets have made.

KD: I agree. AI can be an incredibly valuable tool for reporters, especially as newsrooms have shrunk. It can create real competitive advantages. At WIRED, we’re building our own AI tools for reporting, and one of our goals is actually to beat The New York Times more often. So we’re getting creative with AI in ways other outlets aren’t.

AGS: Everyone needs competition. We’ll be watching with interest. You said in a recent speech that there are early warning signs that AI could erode fact-based reporting. Some of those are obvious, but what do you see as the most concerning early signs? What worries you most about AI right now?

AGS: It’s critical we go back to what I called in that speech the original sin of AI. Good AI products need four core ingredients: the people who write the code, compute (the chips, data centers, and so on), electricity, and what Silicon Valley calls “data”—which is actually content: journalism, books, music, movies. Let’s walk through each of these.

Coders get contracts worth professional sports-level salaries. They get paid like NBA stars. It’s outrageous. Sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars for a single top coder. Now look at compute and electricity: these companies are taking on hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to pay for those resources. That’s how big the prize is if they come out on top. These are already companies with trillion-dollar or near-trillion-dollar valuations, so the stakes are enormous. Now you get to “data,” and they just took it. They took all of it. Without permission, without any compensation, because they thought they could get away with it.

If they get away with this, it supercharges the profit margins of the richest, most valuable companies in human history. If the casualty is gutting what’s left of our already financially struggling journalism industry? So be it. If it destroys the financial models for book writing, music, film, TV, academic research? So be it. That’s objectively wrong. And it’s illegal under U.S. law. Intellectual property protections are written into the Constitution. It’s not legal to just come in and take all of this work.

Why does this matter? Why am I alarmed? We’ve already struggled to compete with giant platforms that basically have a monopoly on human attention. That’s a little overstated, but if you add up all the minutes in a day, a handful of companies and platforms take up the vast majority of it. Now we’re not just competing with companies that control most human attention—they’re designed to be middlemen, and AI works best, in their view, when it sits between the user and the original content creator.

Google is a perfect example of this. It’s hard to overstate how much publishers relied on referral traffic from Google, and how much that traffic has disappeared over the last 18 months as Google rolled out its AI features. Now when you search, you get an AI Overview that’s usually helpful enough that people don’t click through to the original source. That shift alone has been devastating for publishers.

KD: You’re years into this lawsuit. You’ve said publicly you’ve spent roughly $20 million on this legal fight against major AI companies over copyright infringement. How is the case going, and what’s your ideal outcome—not just for the Times, but for the entire news industry? What do you hope to accomplish here?

AGS: Let me start by expanding on that number you mentioned. We’re two and a half years into this lawsuit. Two and a half years. We’ve spent well over $20 million already, and we haven’t even finished discovery yet.

KD: I didn’t realize that. Wow.

AGS: Yeah. When you think about that original sin, the theft of every creative work ever made, it adds up to an enormous wealth transfer: from creators and researchers all over the world to the biggest tech companies in human history. Their sense of impunity, that they can just take our work, exists in part because enforcing your intellectual property rights is so expensive. The Times has worked really hard to get into a financial position where we can afford to fight this. Can you imagine being a small-town newspaper trying to take on Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, or Perplexity? It’s impossible. It’s completely unfeasible.

So these small outlets are backed into an awful position: AI companies already stole their work, they’ve said openly they’ll use it no matter what, and sometimes the companies throw a tiny amount of money at them. What choice do they have? Do they spend what could end up being $40 million on a lawsuit? Or do they accept pennies on the dollar for the work they spent good money to create, just to recoup something? We think it’s critical to enforce our rights and say absolutely not. If you want to use our work, you need permission, and you need to pay fair compensation for it. Someone has to fight this fight. Thankfully, we’re not the only ones—many other publishers have filed similar suits. Our parent company has a few as well.

Silicon Valley tries to paint this suit as anti-tech. And they have done that. It’s not anti-tech. It’s anti-theft. Any time you hear that “anti-tech” line, I want you to picture Jensen Huang walking the floor of his Nvidia factory, and he sees Sam Altman snuck in, has his arms full of chips, and is running out the door. What a perfect visual. Huang says “Hey, you can’t take that!” and Altman says “If you stop me from taking that, you’re anti-tech, Jensen! You’re letting China win!” We’re not anti-tech. We’re anti-theft. This isn’t just about money. It’s about the ability to keep doing this essential work.

KD: You’ve talked a few times about journalists and media executives needing to work together on the AI issue, teaming up to get ahead and win. What does that look like, competing and collaborating at the same time? Because we all compete really fiercely.

AGS: Who do you think has been the Times’ closest, fiercest competitor over the last half century?

KD: The Washington Post.

AGS: I was thinking that too, trying to be polite, but that’s exactly the answer. The Washington Post has always been our fiercest competitor, and they’re still fierce, to their credit. To this day, there are so many great journalists there, and not a week goes by that they don’t publish a scoop that I’m jealous they got first.

They were our fiercest competitors, and they were also our closest allies when the industry came under pressure. Just look at the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times started publishing the Pentagon Papers. The