It's increasingly common for a company's communications team to ask, as a condition of an executive interview, for the right to review and approve quotes before publication. This request comes up often enough on the AI beat specifically - where companies are unusually sensitive about how technical and competitive claims get represented - that we think our policy on it is worth stating plainly.
Why companies ask for this
Quote approval is generally framed as a request for accuracy: making sure a technical point wasn't garbled, or a nuance wasn't lost. In practice it also functions as a mechanism for softening an answer that sounded sharper or more revealing in the moment than the speaker or their communications team is comfortable seeing in print.
Our general policy
We don't grant blanket quote approval. We will confirm a specific technical fact if there's a genuine question about accuracy, but we don't allow a subject or their team to revise or withdraw a substantive quote after the fact simply because it reads less favorably than intended. An interview conducted on that basis isn't really an interview in any meaningful sense.
Where we've made exceptions, and why we say so
On rare occasions, most often with a source dealing with genuine legal exposure rather than reputational preference, we've agreed to narrower review limited to specific legal or safety concerns. Where that's happened, we disclose it, because readers are entitled to know when a piece was produced under different ground rules than usual.
Why this transparency matters
A reader's confidence in a quoted interview depends partly on knowing how it was produced. An interview conducted under full quote-approval control is a meaningfully different document than one that wasn't, even if neither is dishonest, and we think the distinction is worth being upfront about rather than leaving readers to assume every interview was produced the same way.