The Brief – Monday 2 February – Publishers limit Internet Archive, Amazon to invest in OpenAI, data centres driving new gas projects

🗞️ News publishers are limiting access from the Internet Archive over worries AI companies could use its APIs to access their original IP for the purposes of scraping. (NiemanLab)

🤖 Amazon is in talks to make a $50bn investment in OpenAI. (Wall Street Journal)

⚠️ The US is leading a global surge in new gas power plants being built largely due to increased energy demand for data centers. Global development of gas-fired power generation rose by 31% in 2025, with almost a quarter of that added capacity coming from the US. More than a third of that growth in the US is expected to directly power data centers, according to analysis by non-profit Global Energy Monitor (GEM). (The Verge)

🚨Former CNN journalist Don Lemon, who now works independently, was arrested by federal officials. The arrest is in connection to an incident last month in which anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota non-violently disrupted a service at a church, one of the pastors of which is an ICE field director. Lemon was on the scene reporting at the time and says he did not personally take part in the demonstration. He is the highest-profile journalist to be detained by the Trump administration. (ABC)

❗OpenAI’s video generation app Sora is now struggling after hitting the top of the App Store in October. According to data from market intelligence provider Appfigures, Sora’s downloads dropped 32% month-over-month in December 2025. The decline continued in January 2026 with installs falling 45% month-over-month to reach 1.2m. (Techcrunch)

🎙️The BBC has made clear it will not use licence fee payers’ money to help leading pundits such as Micah Richards to work for rival podcasts during the 2026 World Cup. The BBC’s World Cup presentation will come predominantly from its Salford studios, with Richards having a leading role. He will also appear on The Rest is Football podcast which the BBC has said it will not subsidise the cost of. (The Guardian)