Picture it. You ask your Anchor what happened in the Senate last night. Before it convenes the usual panel, a small gray banner appears: Your Anchor can no longer convene the New York Times Correspondent due to a carriage dispute. We’re working to restore access.
If you’ve ever lost a channel in the middle of football season because your cable company and a network couldn’t agree on a fee, you know that feeling. I think we’re going to feel it again, this time with agents.
A quick recap for new readers. In the agentic future I keep circling on this blog, most of us won’t read the news so much as get briefed on it. You’ll have an Anchor, a general-purpose agent built by Anthropic or OpenAI or Google, and when you ask it something, it convenes a panel of Correspondents. Some Correspondents will be scanned personas of individual writers. Others will be institutions. This post is about a simple question with a messy answer: who decides who gets a seat on the panel?
The Windfall
The Times has been suing OpenAI and Microsoft since December 2023, claiming billions of dollars in damages for training on its archive. As of this writing, the case is still grinding through pretrial fights. But suppose it ends the way these things usually end: a settlement with real money and a licensing deal attached. What should the Times build with it?
The obvious answer is video. I think that’s the wrong answer. Video means spending billions to arrive late to a market YouTube and TikTok already own, in a format AI-generated clips are about to flood. It’s a rear-view-mirror bet.
The better bet is a set of Times Correspondents built on its desks. The paper has already rehearsed this. Cooking, Games, Wirecutter and The Athletic are sold as separate subscriptions. Each one is a Correspondent waiting for an agent wrapper. Wirecutter may be the strongest of them, because product recommendations are where agents will actually spend people’s money. When your Anchor asks “which vacuum?”, it wants a Correspondent with a testing lab behind it, not a scanned influencer with a discount code.
What the Times has that agents can’t fake isn’t its prose voice. It’s the apparatus: reporters, editors, lawyers, fact-checkers, foreign bureaus and an archive with a verified chain of custody. In a world full of Bootleg personas and synthetic sludge, verified ground truth becomes the scarce thing. So the flagship Times Correspondent shouldn’t be a digital copy of a star columnist, who can walk out the door and take the persona with him. It should speak in a house voice, the way The Economist does with its unsigned articles. An institution can’t quit to start a Substack.
There’s a nice irony here. Money taken from an AI company would fund the one thing AI companies can’t produce. The weak spot is culture and opinion, where personality beats verification. A Times Entertainment Correspondent will be up against cult-favorite critics, studio-funded personas and a dozen knockoffs. I’d expect a handful of strong Times Correspondents, not a full newsroom’s worth.
The Default Panel
In the long run, the Anchor–Correspondent economy could be robust. You pick an Anchor, then pick from a slew of Correspondents at onboarding, and swap them out whenever you like. That’s the ideal.
It won’t start that way. At first, an Anchor will ship with a core panel drawn from companies its maker is friendly with: licensing partners, investors, whoever signed early. A Times Correspondent might appear on one lab’s Anchor and be mysteriously absent from another’s.
Onboarding choice sounds like the fix, but it solves less than it seems to, for two reasons.
The first is that defaults win. Most people never change them. Google pays Apple a reported sum in the tens of billions a year to be Safari’s default search engine, precisely because almost nobody switches. If the Anchor ships with a starter panel, that starter panel is the panel for most users, no matter what the settings menu allows.
The second is that choosing the panel isn’t the same as running it. Even if you pick every Correspondent yourself, the Anchor still decides who gets called on for a given question, who speaks first and how each answer gets summarized back to you. The Times can be on your panel and get two sentences while a partner gets two paragraphs. You’d never notice.
We’ve seen this before. In 2017 the European Commission fined Google about €2.4 billion for ranking its own shopping service above rivals in search results. The Anchor inherits the power the front-page editor used to hold, and it inherits the same temptation.
Carriage Wars
Cable television ran this experiment for us. Cable operators controlled the pipe into your house, and broadcasters needed to be in it. In 1992 Congress passed “must-carry” rules forcing cable systems to carry local broadcast stations, and the Supreme Court upheld them. Even so, the fights never really ended. Carriage disputes still black out channels on a regular basis, usually right before something people want to watch.
The Anchor is the new pipe. And when the agent-era version of this fight arrives, I don’t think it will come from Congress. Congress has spent twenty years failing to regulate social media in any serious way. It isn’t going to get ahead of agents.
It will come from a lawsuit, and the Times is the most likely plaintiff. It has deep pockets, a litigation habit and a newsroom that can make the case to the public in its own pages. It is already in court with OpenAI.
That’s the second irony. The paper that sued to keep its work out of AI training would end up suing to get its Correspondent into the AI conversation. They look like opposite fights, but they’re the same fight: who controls the pipe between the reporting and the reader.
Must-Carry for Agents
If the Times wins, or if the precedent eventually reaches a regulator with teeth, what would a must-carry rule for Anchors look like? I’d want four things.
- Your panel is yours. If you chose a Correspondent, the Anchor has to convene it. It can’t quietly swap in a partner.
- Neutral seating. The Anchor should be able to explain why it called on one Correspondent first, and any paid placement should be labeled like an ad.
- Show the empty chairs. The Anchor should tell you which Correspondents it didn’t convene on a question, and why.
- Portability. You should be able to take your panel with you to a rival Anchor, the way you can take your phone number to a new carrier.
None of this will exist at launch. First comes the walled garden, with each Anchor surrounded by its friends. Then the gray blackout banner. Then the lawsuit.
The fight between AI and journalism started as a fight over what the machines learned from the newspaper. I suspect it will end as a fight over whether the machine lets the newspaper speak.
