Amazon paying NYT up to $25mn a year in AI deal – WSJ

The landmark licensing agreement came amid legal battles over content use

US tech giant Amazon is paying the New York Times between $20 to $25 million a year to use the paper’s content to train its AI models, the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The multi-year agreement, signed in May, gives Amazon access to the American newspaper’s core news coverage, as well as its cooking and sports platforms. While the partnership was publicly announced at the time, the financial terms were not disclosed.

Under the deal, Amazon can use the licensed material to improve its AI models and incorporate summaries and excerpts from NYT content into products and services such as its Alexa virtual assistant. The agreement marks a first for both parties: it is the NYT’s first licensing deal focused specifically on AI, and Amazon’s first such agreement with a news publisher.

AI companies have exhausted all the easily accessible data in the world and are now trying to overcome difficulties in improving their large-language models, Reuters noted, while reporting on the deal in May.

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While the sum represents only about 1% of the NYT’s annual revenue, the deal signals the emergence of a new income stream for publishers, who can now monetize their journalistic content directly via AI training rather than relying solely on ads or subscriptions.

The agreement also comes amid growing legal tensions between publishers and AI developers. In December 2023, the NYT filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and its major investor Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement. The suit alleged that both companies used the newspaper’s articles without permission to train AI models such as ChatGPT, and that AI-generated summaries could bypass paywalls and reduce web traffic.

OpenAI and Microsoft have denied the allegations, arguing their use of content qualifies as fair use and that their models do not copy articles verbatim but instead learn patterns to generate new text.

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Other publishers have pursued similar partnerships. In 2024, Reuters licensed its articles to Meta Platforms. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.