Weekly use of generative AI tools has risen from about a third of people to half in a year, but only a small minority use them to get news, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2026 report on generative AI and news, published on 29 October.
The survey, run by YouGov for the Oxford institute, asked about 2,000 people in each of nine countries (Argentina, Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Japan, Norway, the UK and the US) between 14 August and 28 September. In the six countries tracked in earlier waves, weekly use rose from 34% to 51%. Weekly use of AI for news was 9% in those six countries and 8% across all nine.
People remain wary of news made by machines. Across the nine countries, 12% said they were comfortable with news made entirely by AI, rising to 19% with some human oversight. And 57% said they had seen AI summaries in search engines in the past week.
One finding will worry publishers: 17% of people who use AI for news said they had used it in the last week to reach stories behind paywalls. The figure is self-reported, and the authors say their data cannot show whether those attempts worked.
The report’s authors are Felix Simon, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Richard Fletcher.
Source: Reuters Institute, Generative AI and News Report 2026