Journalists represented by the NewsGuild-CWA published a statement on 10 August demanding that USA Today Co. end its partnership with Palantir. They said they "were shocked to learn that our company has partnered with Palantir", a company "whose artificial intelligence (A.I.) software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns"1.
The NewsGuild-CWA is the news sector's affiliate of the Communications Workers of America, and it holds the contracts covering reporters at USA Today Co. titles. Its statement records that chief executive Mike Reed "championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue", then sets out the objection: the deal "threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers".
The statement objects to Palantir by name and not to identity resolution, audience segmentation or first-party data collection, all of which the company's newsrooms already feed. The objection is to who runs it and what else that firm's software does. On our reading that leaves a substitution available in principle, since a different vendor could do the same work without the same associations. The union has not said it would accept one.
Regulators have been the usual route into publisher data questions, as when the UK competition authority ordered Google to give publishers opt-out tools over AI scraping and attribution. Here the challenge arrived through a labour contract instead, in a newsroom whose union has already forced an AI product out of a US newsroom this year: Politico shut its Capitol AI Report-Builder and Live Summaries after a binding NewsGuild arbitration found the tools produced factual errors. That ruling bound the company, which is a power the 10 August statement does not itself carry.
