This week there is a tight cluster of stories around how AI companies access content, what that is doing to publishers, and the economic model for compensating creators. But it’s not just a theoretical set of discussions, with at least one practical step publishers need to take in the next couple of weeks.

This week Harvard Business Review published an article by E. Glen Weyl and Raul Castro Fernandez, How AI Companies Can Pay Fair Rates for the Content They Need. As a publisher and author, it’s a subject that’s close to my heart, and I was glad to see HBR addressing it. I agree completely with the authors that both AI companies and authors will benefit from the creation of a sustainable market for content for training purposes—in fact, I’d go further and suggest that society as a whole benefits from that. I also concur with their view that collective management organisations (CMOs) have an important role to play in distributing money to publishers and individual authors. But to me there is a fundamental, fatal flaw in their argument that needs to be called out.

A shorter update this week: seven presentations and workshops in ten days have left me genuinely tired, but they’ve also been the best kind of primary research about how people are encountering AI day-to-day. One theme came up again and again: how to use AI in content and marketing without losing your audience’s trust. That throughline runs through a lot of what follows.

There are two big themes this week: what new AI agents are making possible, and the need for a more nuanced discussion of AI’s impact on authors and publishers. In particular, Matt Webb’s first-person reflection on agents will resonate with any publisher shipping products internationally in 2026.

This week’s newsletter focuses on the economics of AI becoming more visible. Sometimes that’s positive for publishers: a new tool for estimating the value of licensing your content. Other perspectives are more challenging, particularly on the real cost of AI usage. For publishers, the lesson is that AI strategy must now include cost, value and platform-risk assumptions.

It’s been a week of jet lag, catch-up and presentations, with a workshop, a webinar for PW and my friends at Westchester Publishing Services, and the IPG Summer Summit. Before I shut down for the bank holiday weekend in the UK, some updates on what happened in AI and publishing this week:

Greetings from Portland, where I’m writing this on the Thursday of IBPA Publishing University—or, as my body clock is telling me, about 04:30 London time on Friday… It’s been a long day, but lots of good conversations with publishers have helped to sharpen my thoughts on this week’s news.

I’ve been on the road again this week, travelling to Portland, Oregon for the Independent Book Publishers Association Publishing University, where I’m speaking today. One quick observation, informed by email exchanges with my friend and his AI agent while I was travelling, and several conversations at the convention.