Bright Data 的 Jennifer Burns 建議出版商要求登入才可瀏覽內容

Publishers that want to keep AI agents away from their content should put it behind a login, Bright Data’s Jennifer Burns told TNW. Anything a person can see without signing in is public, she said, and should be open to AI too. A paywall counts as a login, and Bright Data would not touch content behind one.

Burns is senior director of PR and communications at Bright Data. The company sells web data infrastructure, the tools that collect public web data for AI models, agents and market research. She joined three and a half years ago, after 20 years as a journalist in local news.

She spoke to Cristian Dina at HumanX in Amsterdam for the TNW Podcast. Earlier episodes featured Atlassian’s Avani Prabhakar and Remote’s Job van der Voort. The full conversation is in the video below.

Public means no login

Bright Data’s line is clear, Burns said. Data behind a login is not public, and everything else is.

“If you make it accessible to any person, it should also be accessible to AI. There, you really can’t pick and choose who is going to be able to view that data and at what scale.” Jennifer Burns, Bright Data

Cristian put the publishers’ case to her: they spend money and resources creating content, and then agents collect it. Her answer was the same. A publisher unhappy with agents can put its content behind a login and choose who gets in.

“I think that it’s a real issue and the market still has to work itself out, but that is not for us to decide how that’s going to happen.” Jennifer Burns

The same fight is playing out elsewhere. Reddit said last week it will make users log in. On Monday, the New York Times and three other US papers sued Brave over scraping.

X and Meta in court

Bright Data has faced Meta and X in court over collecting their data. X brought its lawsuit, Burns said, and Bright Data fought it as it would any case. She said the courts have shown that what it does is legal.

“Anything else that you’re trying to do that does not make that clear distinction between public and non-public data is a form of gatekeeping.” Jennifer Burns

Robots learning from the web

Bright Data now has 50,000 customers, up from 20,000 when Burns joined, she said. It serves 14 of the top 20 LLMs and handles 100 million agent interactions a day. Staff numbers have grown from about 250 to around 600, and the company recently hired a new CTO.

At the end of 2025, robotics companies started asking Bright Data for public data to train on, Burns said. Some wanted to see how people pick up a glass. They needed different glass sizes, shadows and home lighting, and different ways of placing it on a counter. Filming all of that would take forever, she said, but it already exists on the web.

In early 2026, the company moved heavily into the context layer. That is live data that tells an agent what is happening now, such as current prices. Without it, an LLM or agent’s answer is “basically useless,” she said.

Five agents and a human

Burns runs five AI agents in her own job.

“It doesn’t mean that I am less relevant. It makes me more relevant because I have to manage those agents. I can’t let them run without a human in the loop.” Jennifer Burns

Bright Data gives its tools to journalists for free through a journalism programme, she said. She hopes more journalists take up AI quickly. Her advice to AI companies on PR is to understand their story, own it and explain it well. Everyone in the company should be able to do the same.

“Don’t throw around the word AI for the sake of AI. Everything is AI.” Jennifer Burns