The Associated Press is accelerating its embrace of artificial intelligence at a moment when the 180-year-old wire service is also cutting staff and reworking its journalism model. Fortune reported on April 6 that the organisation has begun offering buyouts to more than 120 employees, part of a broader shift towards visual journalism and new revenue streams as traditional newspaper income continues to shrink. AP itself has said newspapers now account for only a small share of its revenue, underscoring how far the business has moved from the era when print clients anchored the service’s finances.

That transition has drawn fresh scrutiny because AP is not only adopting AI internally but also helping train other newsrooms to use it. In a 2024 announcement, the company said it would launch an AI training programme supported by grants from the Omidyar Network and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, with webinars, conference sessions, reporting guides and an AP Stylebook chapter devoted to the technology. The programme was framed as a way to help journalists cover AI across beats while also improving investigative reporting on the subject itself.

The McGovern Foundation’s role has become a focal point for critics of the arrangement. The foundation describes its mission as advancing artificial intelligence and data science for a more equitable and sustainable future, and says its work spans areas including digital health, climate change, media and journalism, and crisis response. In December 2024, it announced $73.5 million in grants to 144 organisations across 11 countries, and a separate round of funding worth $66.4 million for similar human-centred AI projects.

Its president, Vilas Dhar, has also been active in international policy circles. According to the foundation’s own material, he has served on the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence and has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. That background has fuelled concern among AP critics who argue that the news agency is deepening ties with a network of institutions that promote a particular vision of technology, governance and social change.

Supporters of the initiative say the industry has little choice. Media organisations are under intense financial pressure, and many are turning to automation, data tools and AI assistance to cut costs and expand output. Poynter’s MediaWise, working with the McGovern Foundation, recently launched an AI literacy project aimed at journalists, educators and civic groups in dozens of countries, illustrating how widely the media sector is now treating AI as a basic operational skill rather than a future experiment. For AP, the challenge is not only surviving the collapse of its old business model, but doing so without surrendering too much of the editorial judgement that gave the wire service its authority in the first place.

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Source: Noah Wire Services