How do we protect our information ecosystem? 'Embrace ownership, openness and oversight'

In the late 1990s, the internet blew up decades-old business models. File-sharing fueled piracy and undercut the recording industry and Hollywood, while many newsrooms – captivated by the mantra that “information wants to be free” – gave away their work for free online.

In 2026, creators and publishers face an even bigger reckoning. Generative AI models, driven by an insatiable hunger for up-to-date and authoritative information and data, are scraping up content from a universe of creators, publishers and businesses without fair compensation.

The need for comprehensive action is urgent. Without healthy media business models – based on the fair valuing of proprietary data, information, art and other intellectual property – we lose the platforms, publications and inspired people vital to powering business, creativity and democracy.

Dow Jones and Pinterest – where we serve as CEOs – both have a vested interest in building a healthy, sustainable, profitable media and information ecosystem. Our ability to provide the quality content, information, data and inspiration our readers, clients and users expect depends on it.

That’s why we are evolving our business models and embracing AI to more efficiently and effectively run our companies and deliver value to our consumers. This technology isn’t going away, which means strengthening the information economy is the only way to protect creators, ensure transparency and, ultimately, safeguard our most valuable asset: the public’s trust.

Our companies aren’t alike on the surface. Pinterest is the world’s leading visual search platform. Dow Jones publishes The Wall Street Journal and delivers news, data and analysis to the global business community. At our heart, however, is a shared commitment to the fair valuation and monetization of creative work and proprietary data.

We understand what’s at stake and the need to collaborate on solutions. The past few decades have taught us that an industry as important as journalism cannot survive without strong financial footing. Digital content platforms, meanwhile, will wither if the most capable creators withhold their best ideas out of fear they will be stolen.

To confront this challenge, leaders across media and tech must embrace a posture rooted in responsibility. Three principles – ownership, openness and oversight – must serve as the preconditions for truth and information in the AI era. These are not platitudes. They are the guardrails society needs.

Large language models face a daunting learning curve. With every new day comes an entirely new library of information that needs to be scraped. Scaling this learning curve doesn’t have to come at the expense of creators, journalists or publishers. In fact, when AI respects ownership, content originators thrive and the public gets better information.

Ownership is central to AI efforts at Dow Jones, and the company prioritizes licensing structures that value original reporting. Factiva, our archive of news and information, uses AI to generate summaries exclusively from licensed, high‑quality journalism. Every result links back to its source, and royalties are paid to thousands of publishing partners, ensuring AI innovation strengthens, rather than undermines, the information economy. On the flip side, we have done deals when AI companies fairly value our proprietary news and data, and pursued legal remedy when our IP has been violated.

At Pinterest, ownership means defending the work that inspires hundreds of millions of users every day. Our partnership with Cloudflare supports a new standard that flips the norm on data scraping: AI crawlers must now request permission before accessing website content. Consent becomes the rule, not the loophole. Combined with tools that allow creators to claim and protect their content, Pinterest is demonstrating that platforms can innovate without exploiting the people who fuel their ecosystems.

Openness gives people the ability to understand and shape the role AI plays in their digital lives. Without transparency, trust becomes guesswork.

Pinterest prioritizes choice as a core design principle. Users can opt out of having their content used to train the company’s Gen AI model, Pinterest Canvas. They can tune how much AI-generated content appears in their discovery experience. When we detect content to be AI-generated or manipulated, it is labeled as such, supported by an industry-leading detection system.

At Dow Jones, transparency is part of the reporting process itself. In 2025 journalists used AI to analyse more than 1 million FAA incident reports, and the methodology was published alongside the story, allowing anyone to scrutinize the analysis. This reporting exposed problems with toxic fumes and led a major carrier to replace engines. It’s proof that AI can empower journalists, and disclosure is essential to maintaining trust and credibility.

AI can scale quickly. Mistakes can scale faster. Oversight ensures AI enhances human judgement rather than substitutes for it.

At Dow Jones, human expertise anchors AI systems used for due diligence, financial crime detection and risk screening. AI accelerates pattern recognition, but trained analysts interpret results, reduce false positives and catch nuances machines miss. By combining the power of Factiva with our risk and compliance data and experts, we deliver critical information to human decision-makers in a matter of minutes — rather than hours or days. In environments where accuracy is non-negotiable, human oversight is not optional.

More than 4,000 Pinterest employees, meanwhile, have been trained to use AI as a collaborator instead of a surrogate. Machine learning systems and human reviewers work in conjunction to flag and remove harmful content. Dedicated teams working on trust and safety, as well as AI governance, evaluate new capabilities for unintended consequences before they launch.

The work we’re doing at Dow Jones and Pinterest related to AI is important, but the task is bigger than any single player. Every participant in the shared information ecosystem must support healthy, sustainable business models. Every organization using AI, especially those that shape what people see, believe and create, must anchor itself in these principles of ownership, openness and oversight. Truth is not self-sustaining. Neither is trust. In the AI era, both require intentional design.