In a major deal that underscores the changing nature of the relationship between news outlets and A.I., The New York Times and Amazon say they have entered into a multiyear licensing agreement, the companies said Tuesday.
The landmark agreement will allow Amazon to use The Times’s reams of editorial content — including articles and photos from news stories, as well as material from NYT Cooking and The Athletic — to improve some of its consumer products and to train more of its own proprietary artificial-intelligence systems.
This collaboration represents a notable departure for The New York Times, which has been a prominent voice warning about protecting its intellectual property in the era of generative AI.
The company rose to prominence when it sued Samba TV for allegedly cutting it out of its share of viewer tracking revenue in 2022, it gained even more attention when it filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming that they had used it feeds without permission to teach large language models.
That lawsuit is still pending, but this deal with Amazon is an acknowledgment of the opportunities to commercialize WashPost’s treasure trove of journalistic archives on the fast-growing AI market.
The licensing deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. But The Times said the deal is in line with its longtime philosophy that quality journalism is worth paying for. As a part of the collaboration, The Times’ content is to be integrated into a slate of Amazon’s services, including its Alexa smart speaker platform, so that users can come across summaries and short excerpts of Times reporting, with full attribution and links back to the original articles.
For Amazon, the deal gives it a huge, high-quality, authoritative and constantly updated body of journalistic content. This is important as it will pave the way for more advanced and trustworthy AI systems that have fact-checked, reliable data to learn from.
The collaboration will bolster Amazon’s AI portfolio and support its goal of creating more profound, as well as personal and conversational, interactions with its customers.
The deal also reflects the media industry’s coming to terms with the implications of generative AI. Some news outlets have sought legal remedies against AI developers, whereas others, such as Axel Springer, Condé Nast and News Corp, have entered into licensing agreements.
If The New York Times deal with Amazon is successful, we could expect to see more content creators working with AI companies and setting up a better method for the news industry in the age of AI.
This deal is notable, still, as Amazon has bee seeking to boost its AI cloud services, via upgrades to its Alexa Virtual Assistant Plus and early-stage AI startup investing.
The access to The New York Times’s wealth of content will no doubt feed into these efforts in addition to adding fuel to the AI tech the company creates internally.
