Journalists Shut Down AI Slop at POLITICO

Last month, POLITICO management, after months of negotiations between our members at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild (TNG-CWA Local 32035), agreed to shut down two artificial intelligence "tools" that spread misinformation. Our members at POLITICO and E&E News announced in December of 2025 a landmark win in their arbitration case against POLITICO over the company’s unilateral introduction of artificial intelligence tools that bypassed negotiated safeguards and undermined core journalistic standards.

The company will shut down Capitol AI Report-Builder, a tool that produced branded policy reports for POLITICO Pro subscribers without any editorial review, despite generating glaring factual errors. It also will not revive the “Live Summaries” AI feature, which generated error-riddled unedited coverage of major political events, including the 2024 Democratic National Convention and Vice Presidential Debate. Both uses were found by an arbitrator in November 2025 to have violated POLITICO and E&E News members’ collective bargaining agreement.

“This is an extraordinary win not just for our members, but for everyone who believes journalism must remain in human hands,” said Ariel Wittenberg, the unit chair. “We refused to back down, and POLITICO heard us loud and clear that these tools do not belong in our newsroom.”

The arbitration case was one of the first major labor rulings in the United States to address the impact of AI on journalists’ work and sets a major precedent for the future of journalism in the age of artificial intelligence.

Click here to read more about this landmark case.

---

This post originally appeared on cwa-union.org.