The New York Times and Amazon ink AI licensing deal

Nearly two years after suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, The New York Times has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon to train the tech giant’s AI platforms. 

The agreement will “bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the outlet said in a statement. That includes content like news articles, material from NYT Cooking, a site dedicated to food and recipes, and The Athletic, its sports-focused site. 

The company also noted that Amazon’s use of The Times’s editorial content could extend to Alexa software on its smart speakers. 

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s the first of such agreements for Amazon. OpenAI has signed multiple similar deals with publishers, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, NewsCorp, Axel Springer, and more. 

This is also the first time The Times is agreeing to a generative AI-focused licensing arrangement, and it comes after the outlet accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of articles published by The Times to train their AI models without consent or compensation. Both OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected allegations of wrongdoing. 

TechCrunch has reached out to The New York Times for more information.