Google Pitches AI News Summary Tool to Skittish Media Outlets

Alphabet Inc.’s Google pitched major news outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR and People Inc., on an AI tool that summarizes news articles earlier this year, but the reception was cool.

The tech giant demonstrated the product, called Summarizer API, at a meeting in New York in February, according to three people familiar with the event who asked to not be identified because the discussions weren’t public.

The Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Photographer: Benjamin Fanjoy/Bloomberg

Guests were asked to put away their phones and not record anything during the presentation. A product manager working on applications related to the Google Chrome web browser demonstrated the ...