The Times and Amazon announce an AI licensing deal

The New York Times Co. has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said Thursday.

The multiyear agreement “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organisation said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, the Times’ food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports.

This is the Times’ first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative AI technology.

In 2023, the Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by the Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.

Financial terms of the licensing deal with Amazon were not disclosed.

“The deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the CEO 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.”

Amazon’s use of editorial content from the Times could extend to the Alexa software found on its smart speakers. In some instances, excerpts from Times reporting will include attribution and a link back to the Times’ website. Material from the Times will also be used to train Amazon’s proprietary AI models, the company said.

Amazon declined to comment beyond what was in the statement issued by the Times.

News organisations have wavered on how to contend with the rapid emergence of AI technology, elements of which have been developed by software programs that ingest the content of millions of online news stories.

Even as the Times pursued litigation against OpenAI, other news outlets — including Axel Springer, Condé Nast and News Corp — entered into licensing agreements to receive revenue in exchange for the use of their materials. The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, agreed to a deal with OpenAI last month.

Amazon itself has been playing a bit of catch-up in the AI race.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, kicking off the AI boom, Amazon was caught flat-footed, much like Google, Meta and Apple.

Chatbots like ChatGPT are driven by what scientists call neural networks, mathematical systems that can learn skills by analysing huge amounts of digital data. By pinpointing patterns in vast troves of Wikipedia articles, news stories and chat logs, for instance, these systems can learn to generate humanlike text on their own, including poems, term papers and computer programs.

Like Google, Microsoft and Meta, Amazon had the computing power needed for the task. As the world’s largest cloud computing company, it ran a vast network of data centers filled with the specialised computer chips used to train AI systems. But it lacked some of the talent needed to build the most sophisticated systems, and the company had not prioritized the technology to the degree of OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft.

Last June, Amazon inked a deal with a key AI startup called Adept, bringing on many of its employees, including its founder, David Luan. Amazon paid Adept at least $330 million to license its technology, three people with knowledge of the transaction said.

Amazon later inked a similar deal with another important startup called Covariant, bringing on its top talent including its co-founder Pieter Abbeel, a professor of robotics at the University of California, Berkeley, who previously worked for OpenAI.

Luan and Abbeel are now leading an Amazon research lab that aims to build “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. This ambitious goal is also the stated aim of OpenAI and other leading research labs, such as Google DeepMind. Data licensed from the Times could help fuel the efforts of Amazon’s AGI lab.

In addition to its own AI work, Amazon has established a close partnership with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s chief rivals. Over the past two years, the tech giant has invested $4 billion in the startup.

Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is not just a simple equity stake. Much like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, it gives Amazon access to Anthropic’s AI systems — and commits Amazon computer power to the startup. Amazon also receives an early shot at making Anthropic’s AI models available to customers of its cloud computing service.