Fact-checkers reckon with shrinking budgets and growing AI threats at GlobalFact 2026

Fact-checkers around the world are facing a squeeze. At this month's GlobalFact conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, hundreds of fact-checking professionals gathered to confront two pressing crises: shrinking budgets and an explosion of AI-generated disinformation. According to Nieman Lab, Lithuania's defense minister opened the conference with stark language, calling it cognitive warfare—a signal of how seriously democracies now view the threat. As AI tools make it easier to create convincing false content, the fact-checking networks tasked with debunking it are losing funding. It's an arms race where one side is scaling up while the other is scraping by.

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