Yahoo CEO Warns AI Poses ‘Existential’ Threat to Publishers

Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone cautioned during a Wednesday speech that artificial intelligence poses a grave, "existential" threat to the future of digital publishers. Speaking at the Paley International Council Summit in New York, Lanzone said AI-powered search engines are altering a longstanding agreement between publishers and search engines - where publishers let search engines crawl their sites in exchange for referral traffic.

"For the first 27, 28 years of the internet, there was a social contract" between publishers and search engines, Lanzone noted. However, as AI companies start directly answering user inquiries, visitors are less inclined to return to original websites. Lanzone cited declines in traffic ranging from 60% to 70%, though he didn't specify which publishers or over what period.

"You can't run a business that way," he argued, urging AI firms to direct more traffic back to source websites. Bluesky COO Rose Wang expressed broader worries about Big Tech's increasing dominance over the distribution of information online. As news publishers lose search engine traffic and consider licensing their content to AI companies, Google recently announced adjustments to its AI-powered search features to make links to original sources more visible.

More than 400 publications, including CNN, Axios and the Financial Times, are participating in Google's News AI licensing program. OpenAI's ChatGPT head, Nick Turley, had warned internally in court documents last month that publishers face an "existential threat" as AI products increasingly replace website visits. Yahoo is taking a different path with Yahoo Scout, an AI search tool launched in January that provides answers while connecting users to the websites supplying the information.

Lanzone emphasized Yahoo's desire to revert to its role as a gateway to content across the internet. In contrast, Wang described the current internet landscape as "technofeudalism", comparing major tech platforms to landowners collecting payments from creators and developers operating on their platforms. She argued that users should have more control over their identities and data rather than depending on a few companies to dictate how content is shared.

Wang suggested that rather than attempting to alter the minds of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, companies supporting the open web should collaborate and direct traffic among themselves instead of remaining reliant on the largest tech platforms.