SODP Dispatch - 15 October 2026

US tech leaders are urgently calling for rules on AI – China already has them

By Madeline Carr

Recent warnings from American AI leaders have created the impression that the world is only beginning to confront the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of tech company Anthropic, has called for governments to intervene to slow the development of increasingly powerful AI models.

His proposal begins with independent evaluators embedded inside AI companies, moves on to regulation and progresses to government-backed coordination among democratic states.

Ultimately, it seeks global agreements with China on testing of AI systems, dangerous applications of the technology and the pace of AI development.

Yet there is a China-shaped hole in this narrative. The Asian superpower is portrayed as the difficult final participant in a governance system that the US and its allies must first create.

In fact, China has already established an extensive system of AI rules, assessment, filing, technical standards and government oversight. Here’s how China’s AI governance system has developed in stages alongside the technology itself.

💬 We want to hear from you: Should the rules for advanced AI come from governments, from the companies building it, or from something in between? Hit reply and tell us; we read every response, and yours might shape a future issue.

🎯 LiveRamp × OpenAI: Measure Your ChatGPT Ad Performance

If you're running or planning ads on ChatGPT, you can now close the measurement gap. LiveRamp's Conversions API (CAPI) Hub connects directly to ChatGPT ad campaigns via secure server-to-server data connections, meaning you get reliable conversion tracking without depending on browser-based signals that often break or go missing.

In practice, this means you can:

• See which ChatGPT campaigns are actually driving conversions — not just clicks

• Optimize spend in real time based on accurate performance data

• Justify and grow your ChatGPT ad budget with measurement data you can trust

As consumer journeys shift toward AI-powered platforms, this gives marketers the infrastructure to keep up, connecting data, measuring impact, and proving ROI on one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces in the world.

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By Vahe Arabian

🗄️ AI Content Licensing for Publishers, Get Your Archive Deal-Ready

Your archive has been a cost on the balance sheet for years. Storage, migrations, CMS upgrades - all expense, no return. Someone is now willing to pay for it, and most publishers can't say yes.

Every publisher I talk to has either had an enquiry from an AI company, an aggregator or a retailer or will soon. A lot of those emails go nowhere. The deal usually isn't the problem — the buyer is motivated, and the money is real. The problem sits inside the building. Nobody can answer the first three questions fast enough to keep the conversation alive. What do we hold full rights to? Which pieces include freelancer, agency or wire content we can't resell? What would we even charge?

So the enquiry stalls. It gets forwarded to legal, then to editorial, then back again, and three weeks later the buyer has moved on to someone who was ready.
Licensing is a housekeeping problem before it's a legal one. The contract matters, but it comes last. The publishers who get paid are the ones who did the boring work before the email arrived, the work nobody wants to own because it doesn't ship anything and doesn't show up in a traffic report.

What a licensable archive needs:

• Rights metadata on each piece. Who wrote it, under what agreement, with what reuse terms attached. If every sale needs a manual legal review, you'll never move fast enough to close one, and the buyer can tell.

• Structure a buyer can use. They want to take content by topic, date or format, not as one giant undifferentiated dump. An archive you can slice is worth more than one you can only hand over whole.

• Terms machines can read. The things crawling your site are automated, and so are the deals coming. Automated readers should be able to see what they can take and on what basis without a human in the loop.

• A named owner and a starting price logic. Someone whose job it is to catch the enquiry, and a defensible way to put a number on it. An enquiry with no owner is a deal that quietly dies in an inbox.

Owning content and owning a licensable asset are not the same thing. One sits on a server costing you money. The other can be sold tomorrow. The gap between them is metadata, and it's a gap you close with process, not with a lawyer.

The publishers who set terms early get to set the rate. Everyone else gets handed one by a buyer who already knows exactly what they're willing to pay and has no reason to offer more.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Check who owns the licensing enquiry today. If it's nobody, start there, before anything else on this list.

2. Rights metadata is what turns an archive from a cost into something sellable.

3. Structure the archive so it can be licensed in parts, not only as a whole.

4. Publish machine-readable terms before you're asked, not after.

5. Early movers set the price. Late movers accept it.

Who in your business would answer an AI licensing enquiry tomorrow? Hit reply and tell me; I read every response.

As the traffic ad model ends, publishers need a new advertising playbook | INMA

The advertising transformation in news media is a universal shift, and no publisher is immune. “Everything is happening to everyone,” Gabriel Dorosz, lead of the INMA Advertising Initiative, told INMA members during this week’s Webinar. The only differences are speed, timing, and impact, depending on each company’s revenue mix and market structure, he said. Looking at the forces reshaping the industry, Dorosz delivered his findings in three parts: the transformation, the playbook, and the deeper strategic questions facing the future of news advertising.

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Two creators went to NYU’s business school, then decided to make a show about the news | Nieman Lab

On a September afternoon in Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood, Shreyas Sinha is sitting on a toilet, wearing a blue suit. Looking into the camera, he asks, “Why is it that everything I’ve been eating this year is giving me diarrhea?” Sinha is about to link the 2026 cyclospora outbreaks to decades of problems at the Food and Drug Administration. “I’m only allowed to make three diarrhea jokes in this video,” Sinha says. “I live in tyranny.” The toilet video is one of the tamer stunts that Sinha and his co-creator, Gaurav Srivatchan, have pulled for their YouTube channel.

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A B2B Publisher’s Answer to AI: Invest in What It Can’t Replace | A Media Operator

After roughly two months of using AI, Faversham House is seeing about 50% more sales opportunities on some of the product lines where its sales team is using the technology most heavily, compared with the number of opportunities those same product lines were generating a year earlier. The roughly £11 million UK B2B media and events company is using AI to research prospects, prepare sales calls, assess the strength of opportunities and turn call notes into proposals, work that Event Sales Director Charlie Scott says is making her nine-person team faster and better prepared.

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Facebook is giving users more control over their algorithm | TechCrunch

Facebook is the latest social media platform to give users greater control over the algorithm that determines what appears in their feeds. Meta announced the launch of its new AI-powered feature, “Your Algorithm,” on Tuesday, a feature it first launched on Instagram. The new tool allows Facebook users to influence the content they see in Feed and Reels by describing their preferences in their own words using natural language. Rather than relying entirely on automated recommendations, users can now communicate directly with the platform about the topics and content they want to see more or less frequently.

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Why SEO Isn’t Enough Anymore – And Why That’s A Good Thing | SEJ

SEO has been the most profitable channel by some margin for the last 15 years. We can debate about the rights and (broadly) wrongs of last-click attribution until the cows come home, but SEO has been the money channel. The channel the execs have leapt at. But now, the days of traffic for old rope are gone. Audience journeys have become more complicated than ever, and some of the shine has been taken off search. While it was always over-buffed, you’d be a fool to forget Google. According to all of the clickstream data I’ve seen, the majority of user journeys – regardless of whether it’s AI-led – use Google at some stage.

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Forty more publishers join coalition to stop AIs profiting from their content | AdNews

Forty more publishers, including The New York Times, AFP and The Economist, have joined a coalition, SPUR, seeking to prevent AIs from using or profiting from their content ‌without permission. The coalition launched in February and now has more than 80 members in more than 20 countries. The founding members are the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Mediahuis, Sky News, Telegraph Media Group, the Associated Press and CMA Media. SPUR says it is working to create a fair market for the use of content in AI systems, setting rules so content owners and tech platforms can do business transparently. 

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