The Tinius Trust joins international effort on traceable information in the age of AI

The Tinius Trust is joining the venture studio Signals at Scale as a partner. The studio defines the problems to be solved in the emerging AI-mediated information ecosystem and funds those building systems that make the information reaching users through artificial intelligence possible to verify.

Signals at Scale was founded by Shuwei Fang, a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, and David Caswell, formerly head of AI innovation at BBC News Labs. Signals at Scale identifies challenges in the emerging ecosystem, assembles small teams around each challenge, funds them and sets deadlines.

The studio starts from the assumption of a greatly expanded information ecosystem, with vastly more information flowing through it. Functions such as traceability, verification and compensation look very different if information output is 100 or 1,000 times what manual workflows produce today, or if consumption becomes dramatically more personalised and relevant.

Why the Tinius Trust is taking part

As a long-term media owner, the Tinius Trust wants to help build this infrastructure for crediting and paying sources.

"The Tinius Trust works to secure good conditions for free media, as our articles of association require. For a long time that has meant legislation and source protection. Now a large part of the framework is set in the technology itself, in how language models choose sources, what they credit and how errors are corrected. No common standard is in place yet, and nobody knows where it will be made. Signals at Scale is one of several attempts. We would rather take part in those attempts than wait for an answer from the technology giants," says Nicklas Stavnar, Head of Foresight at the Tinius Trust.

What the partnership involves

The partnership runs for two years, from 1 September 2026. The Tinius Trust contributes around NOK 3.1 million a year.

Earlier work with the same researchers

This is the second time the Tinius Trust has worked with Caswell and Fang. In 2025 the trust funded and took part in the project AI in Journalism Futures 2025. The project is published here