The New York Times on Thursday announced that it will license content from across its newsroom to train Amazon AI models.
Under the multi-year deal, Amazon’s AI services like Alexa will be able to use Times content, including from NYT Cooking and sports website The Athletic, to produce summaries and short excerpts in real time. The Jeff Bezos-owned company will use decades’ worth of the Gray Lady’s content to train its AI models.
“The collaboration will make The New York Times’s original content more accessible to customers across Amazon products and services, including direct links to Times products, and underscores the companies’ shared commitment to serving customers with global news and perspectives within Amazon’s AI products,” the Times said in a statement.
The deal is “consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” The New York Times Company’s CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said in an internal memo obtained by CNN. “It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”
Amazon consumers will be provided direct links to Times products “whenever it makes sense,” a Times spokesperson told CNN. The deal is designed to ensure that when Times articles are used, they’re correctly attributed and presented in a way that maintains the paper’s journalistic integrity, the spokesperson said.
“We believe this appro ach helps address concerns about potential misrepresentation while making quality journalism more accessible in emerging AI experiences,” the spokesperson said.
While the agreement to use content is new, the deal expands an existing relationship in which the Times has used Amazon Music to host its podcasts. The Times remains open to working with other companies, the spokesperson said, so long as they provide fair value in exchange for the paper’s content and respect the Gray Lady’s reporting through the full scope of AI uses.
The Times declined to provide a dollar figure attached to the deal.
Licensing deals are viewed by many as a viable recourse as AI companies continue to train chatbots using copyrighted data while pulling in profits. Since chatbots are designed to provide users with in-app answers, making them less likely to click through to publishers’ websites and exacerbating traffic woes, the deals afford news publishers a cut of AI profits.
The move is a departure from the Times’ previous position toward AI chatbots. In December 2023, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the pair of having illegally scraped millions of articles to train ChatGPT and other AI services. And the Times is not alone in accusing chatbots of intellectual theft: Ziff Davis in April sued OpenAI, similarly accusing the company of copyright infringement; and eight Alden Global Capital-owned publications sued OpenAI and Microsoft in April 2024 with similar complaints.
The Times isn’t the only company to do business with an AI company while engaged in a legal fight with another chatbot maker. While the Rupert Murdoch-owned Dow Jones and New York Post sued Perplexity AI in October for illegally copying content, News Corp in May 2024 signed a years-long deal with OpenAI to license content from the media giant’s companies, which include The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Barron’s.
Still, not all news publishers have been so resistant. The Washington Post, Guardian Media Group, Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Axios, Reuters, Hearst and the Financial Times are just a few news organizations that have inked deals with AI companies to license their content.
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