The New York Times has already invested more than $20 million in its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, with publisher A.G. Sulzberger showing no signs of backing down. The case, filed in 2023, centres on whether AI companies can train models on copyrighted journalism without licensing agreements or compensation.
For payment service providers and card-not-present merchants, the fight highlights a broader regulatory tension: how do you enforce terms of service when the value chain is digital, decentralised, and often adversarial? Whether it's content scraping, chargebacks, or KYC bypasses, platforms face actors who extract value while sidestepping the commercial relationship. Direct acquirers operating in high-risk verticals—iGaming, forex, crypto on-ramps—already navigate this grey zone daily, building compliance and orchestration layers to identify misuse before it scales. Just as the Times is defending its moat with litigation, PSPs defend transaction integrity with tooling: tokenisation, behavioural AI, and real-time decisioning that separates legitimate flow from exploitation.
Read the full report at Wired Business.