• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, December 15, 2024

Do you know anything about your AI service?

The top five AI fact-checking companies are sufficiently transparent about their ownership and finances. But they are in the minority and publishers often don’t who they are dealing with, judging by Control Beyond Code: Ownership and Financial Insights of AI Used in Journalism, a study from the Media and Journalism Research Center. 

Of 100 AI firms studied overall, only 33% are transparent, while 67% are not.

Drilling down, only five out of 23 AI fact-checking services are adequately transparent. Again, they are not clear about who owns them, their revenue and financing. 

“In the absence of this data, it is challenging to ascertain how an AI tool company is influenced by investors or stakeholders, its size, or the individuals or entities that can be held accountable for the tool,” the study states.

Moreover, only 48 of the 100 firms had a list of investors available. And even some of those claims could not be checked for veracity, the report states. But 62% had confirmable ownership. 

So who’s who?

The top five companies in terms of revenue are:

• Claude AI (Anthropic)—$430 million
• Dataminr--$320 million
• Grammarly--$99 million
• Notion--$93 million
• Jasper AI--$82 million

• Claude AI (Anthropic)--$7,600 million-$7,750 million
• Dataminor--$1,050 million-$1,100 million
• Grammarly--$400 million
• Notion--$343 million
• A121 Labs--$326 million

Geography is another matter. Only 74 of the firms studied had an identifiable country of origin. 

Of these, “47% are headquartered in North America, 19% are in Europe, 5% are in Asia, and 3% are in the Middle East. Some 43% of AI tool companies are headquartered in the United States,” the study reports.

Out of these, “25 companies (or 58%) have been classified as adequately transparent, 12 (or 27%) as somewhat transparent, and five (or 11%) as not transparent.” 

The data collection for this study took place between April and June 2024. To identify the tools, the researchers queried search engines like Google with terms similar to: “artificial intelligence tools for journalists and newsrooms.” The author is Sydney Martin.