Politico became one of the first newsrooms last year to win a union contract that included rules on how the media outlet can deploy artificial intelligence. The PEN Guild, which represents Politico and its sister publication, environment and energy site E&E News, is now gearing up for another first. The union’s members allege that the AI provisions in their contract have been violated, and they’re preparing for a groundbreaking legal dispute with management. The outcome could set a precedent for how much input journalists ultimately have over how AI is used in their newsrooms.
Last year, Politico began publishing AI-generated live news summaries during big political events like the Democratic National Convention and the US vice presidential debates. This March, it debuted a suite of AI tools called Policy Intelligence Assistance for paying subscribers, which were built in partnership with the Y Combinator-backed startup Capitol AI. Politico executive Rachel Loeffler described the initiative at the time as “seamlessly integrating generative AI with our unmatched policy expertise.”
Politico union members, however, allege these tools violated their contract in several ways, and are taking the dispute to arbitration this July. “The company is required to give us 60 days notice of any use of new technology that will materially and substantively impact bargaining unit job duties,” says PEN union chair and E&E public health reporter Ariel Wittenberg. The union claims that it was given neither notice nor an opportunity to bargain in good faith over Politico’s AI rollout, and that the tools do work that would ordinarily be done by human staff.
“This isn’t just a contract dispute, it’s a test of whether journalists have a say in how AI is used in our work. With no federal rules in place, union contracts remain one of the only enforceable frameworks for AI accountability on a national scale,” says Newsguild president Jon Schleuss. (PEN Guild is a unit within Newsguild, one of the most prominent unions for journalists.)
Politico says the publication “takes the obligations under its collective bargaining agreement seriously,” and “will continue to honor those obligations while also rapidly embracing transformative technologies such as AI that will revolutionize how our audience consumes news and information,” according to spokesperson Heather Riley.
Politico’s contract stipulates that the publication needs to use AI in a manner that follows the company’s standards of journalistic ethics. “We’re not against AI, but it should be held to the same ethical and style standards as our political journalists,” says Arianna Skibell, the union’s vice chair for contract enforcement, who writes Politico’s energy industry newsletter. Some union members question whether there’s always appropriate human oversight over the AI content Politico publishes.
In one case, an AI-generated live summary used language about immigration that human writers are not permitted to use, publishing phrases like “criminal migrants” as it covered the vice presidential debates.
“There were also factual errors that the AI inserted that night,” alleges Skibell. For example, she says, the AI credited actions taken by the Biden administration as things Kamala Harris did. That post was later swapped for replacements without the errors, according to screenshots reviewed by WIRED. “At Politico, you can’t just wholly take down articles written by human reporters without going through a series of approvals, all the way up to newsroom leadership. That did not happen for the AI live summaries,” Wittenberg claims. (Politico did not comment on the specifics of the union’s allegations.)
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