The NewsGuild, which represents journalists at USA Today, is pushing back hard against its parent company’s new partnership with Palantir.

USA Today Co. is working with Palantir to build what CEO Mike Reed called a “common AI agent layer” around reader data, with the goal of generating more “actionable intelligence” and monetizing those relationships faster.

The union says its members were “shocked” by the deal and is calling on the company to end it immediately. It says USA Today hasn’t clearly explained what reader data Palantir will access or how it’ll be protected, while Palantir itself is also a major subject of the company’s journalism, particularly around surveillance, ICE and government contracts.

That’s the part that makes this different from deals like OpenAI partnering with News Corp or Axel Springer(Forgot the TBPN acquisition). Those were largely about licensing publishers’ content to AI companies. Here, a company USA Today is supposed to scrutinize is being brought in to analyze and monetize its own readers.

The watchdog hired the thing it’s supposed to watch.

I kinda get the business logic though: search traffic is collapsing, so USA Today wants to hold onto readers and monetize them better. Maybe it crossed an old journalism taboo along the way. But then again… how much longer can the news business keep going like this?

USA Today union says Palantir AI deal threatens journalistic integrity, demands it be ended immediately