NYT Lands an AI Partner, and Presumably a Lot of Money
Michael M. Grynbaum and Cade Metz
If you've read a story in The New York Times about AI in the past couple of years, you've undoubtedly read the disclaimer that they're suing OpenAI (and its partner, Microsoft). I've probably read that disclaimer a couple hundred times. Maybe more. Well, bad news: you're going to keep reading it. Because that lawsuit remains ongoing despite the fact that NYT just struck their first official AI licensing deal. Because it wasn't with OpenAI (or Microsoft), it was with Amazon:
The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday.
The agreement “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement also encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports.
This is the first instance of The Times agreeing to a licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology.
Why Amazon? The company whose founder and largest shareholder famously owns a rival newspaper? Because that's where the money is, apparently:
“The deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive of The Times, said in a note to staff. “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.”
Read: they were willing to pay more than what OpenAI offered us. A number so insulting that we sued them.
Obviously, these Amazon/NYT terms were not disclosed, but this is a deal involving newspapers and potentially the future of the news business – you can bet someone is going to dig it up, and I imagine quite fast.
The problem there, no matter how impressive – or not impressive – the number ends up being is that it's not actually going to point to a sustainable model for anyone else in the business. These one-off, bespoke deals are never going to scale. So while it may be good for The New York Times that Amazon was willing to pay up, it probably also doesn't actually mean all that much for the future of the business.
One tidbit included at the end of the post (which is breaking news, so it's still noted as a "developing story") is that this deal will allow Amazon to use NYT content with Alexa. That's only interesting if it means such content will explicitly be banned/limited from other such services – namely, ChatGPT, Gemini, and yes, even Siri. Presumably, each of those services gets around it using web search as a sort of "backdoor" to get at such information, but what if Amazon devices/services start getting access to NYT information and scoops early? Almost like a Bloomberg Terminal for the AI era!
If different models have different levels of real world knowledge... that gets pretty messy, pretty fast.
One more thing: "Material from The Times will also be used to train Amazon’s proprietary A.I. models, the company said." I wonder what the actual reporters and writers at The Times will think about that...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler