Industry executives, elected officials, and leaders in publishing gathered at an AI Power Summit in New York on Monday to debate how artificial intelligence is already reshaping large parts of society and what policy and business responses might follow.
Speakers framed the technology as both a source of fresh opportunities and a growing challenge for established institutions, with journalism emerging as a recurring focus of concern. The program brought together voices from the AI sector, a sitting U.S. senator, a former White House official, and senior figures from several publishing companies.
Anna Wintour opened the day with a frank take on the mood inside newsrooms. “In journalism, many of us have been excited and worried about AI in equal measure,” she said. “We worry about it replacing our work, and the work of those we write about.”
Onstage, lawmakers sketched different routes for policy. Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, urged regulators to learn lessons from social media and to set guardrails around copyright and related matters before the technology causes greater harm. “We want to deal with the perfect storm that is engulfing journalism,” he said in conversation with global editorial director Katie Drummond.
Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and one of the authors of the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, defended that policy blueprint as a framework that took AI risks seriously, arguing it put more regulatory focus on potential harms than other national plans.
Executives from large tech firms painted a more optimistic picture about broader economic effects and stressed their intent to deploy AI in ways they described as responsible. Markham C. Erickson, vice president of government affairs and public policy at Google, framed the moment in generational terms. “We have this generational opportunity to reignite American scientific leadership and to renew America’s position as a leader in innovation around the globe,” he said, pointing to the company’s work applying AI to modeling protein interactions and materials science as examples.
Erickson pushed back on criticism that search features and summaries have siphoned traffic from publishers. Publishers and news executives, though, say the evidence points the other way. AI Overviews and similar tools that summarize articles rather than directing readers to original pages have been linked by many outlets to steep drops in referral traffic from search. Erickson added, “We want a healthy ecosystem.”
Media executives on a later panel described a much harsher reality for publishers. “The insinuation that AI Overview is not getting in the way of the 10 blue links and the traffic going back to creators and publishers is just 100 percent false,” said Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett | USA Today Network. He pointed to public data and internal metrics that show fewer people arriving at publisher sites from search.
Jim Bankoff, cofounder, chair, and CEO of Vox Media, and Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc., voiced concerns that mirrored Reed’s. Reed announced that Gannett had launched its own reader-facing product, DeeperDive, a chatbot-like feature intended to answer audience questions without sending users to an outside AI provider.
Roger Lynch, who previously served as CEO of Pandora and now leads a major publishing company, drew a parallel with the music business’s early negotiations with streaming services. “AI is having a dramatic impact on our industry,” he said. “We are really talking about billions of dollars to compensate industries like ours for one of the most critical inputs for these models, which is the content.”
Panels moved between policy questions, business models, and technical work. Some sessions focused on tasks such as applying machine learning to science and engineering problems; others returned repeatedly to the economics of content and whether or how publishers will be paid when AI systems rely on their work to generate summaries and answers.
Attendees included a mix of industry lobbyists, corporate policy leads, editorial leaders, and government officials. The lineup underscored how AI intersects with public policy, corporate strategy, and the livelihoods of creators and newsrooms.