New York Times Agrees to License Content to Amazon for AI Use

The New York Times Co. has reached a deal to license its editorial content to Amazon.com Inc. for use across its artificial intelligence platforms, marking the first such agreement the newspaper company has struck after years of battles between the media and a new, disruptive technology.

The multiyear collaboration “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news outlet said in a statement Thursday. In addition to editorial content, the deal will include recipes from NYT Cooking and The Athletic, which focuses on sports.

“This broadens the companies’ existing relationship, and will bring additional value to Amazon customers and bring Times journalism to wider audiences,” the publisher said.

Summaries and short excerpts of Times content will be displayed within Amazon products and services, such as the Alexa voice platform, and used to train Amazon’s proprietary AI models, according to the statement.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and Amazon declined to comment.

The New York Times remains embroiled in a lawsuit with OpenAI and its partner Microsoft Corp. over copyright infringement. The Times sued the tech companies in 2023, accusing them of using millions of articles published by the newspaper to train chatbots without compensation.

OpenAI has been accused of scraping text across the web to train its popular ChatGPT chatbot since it debuted in 2022. The AI startup has been sued by prominent authors and other news publishers for breach of copyright. The narrative-style answers that AI tools like ChatGPT provide rival, and sometimes replicate, news articles, which has caused publishers concern about losing readers and advertising revenue. Dozens of publishers have signed lucrative licensing deals with OpenAI, Alphabet Inc. and Perplexity AI in order to wrest back some of that lost business.

Photo: The New York Times building in New York City. Photographer: Mike Coppola/Getty Images