When Newspapers Block AI, Who Speaks to Voters? A Game-Theoretic Model of a Business Standoff with Political Externalities

Major newspapers block AI crawlers, while parties and partisan sites leave their text open. This paper builds a game-theoretic model of the hold-out and asks what voters hear while it lasts. In the model, an AI that cannot grade its sources pools the text it can read; two persuaders choose how much nearly free text to publish; and an AI lab may license a newspaper's reporting for its lost revenue. Neither the newspapers nor the lab has a political aim. Three results follow. First, the persuaders flood the AI, and the lab licenses each newspaper once a fixed share of the voters closest to it asks the AI, whatever the AI says. Second, newspapers whose voters dislike the AI's answers more hold out longer, and their voters hear the flood longer. Third, licensing bends the persuaders' contest by a small tilt from where the costs alone put it: patient persuaders tilt the AI's answers against the voters' average ideology, and impatient ones toward it. Business decisions with no political aim thus set how long each group hears the flood and which way the AI's answers tilt.