OpenAI Racks Up Data and Content Deals with News Corp, Vox, and The Atlantic

OpenAI has permission to display content from News Corp mastheads in response to user questions and to enhance its products. OpenAI will receive access to current and archived content from News Corp’s major news and information publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, FN, and New York Post; The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun; The Australian, news.com.au, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, and Herald Sun; and others. In addition to providing content, News Corp will share journalistic expertise to help ensure the highest journalism standards are present across OpenAI’s offering.

Vox Media positioned its OpenAI agreement as strategic. In addition to providing access to content, Vox says it plans to collaborate with OpenAI to launch innovative products and integrate the technology with the Forte data platform.

The Atlantic also positioned the OpenAI agreement as strategic. The publisher intends to launch a new microsite that showcases its AI products, including collaboration with OpenAI. Articles from The Atlantic will be discoverable within OpenAI’s products, such as ChatGPT, and as a partner, The Atlantic will help shape how news is surfaced in future real-time discovery products.

This deal also includes the development of an experimental microsite called Atlantic Labs to figure out how AI can help in the development of new products and features to better serve its journalism and readers.

What it Means

OpenAI has three objectives driving these deals. First, it needs high-quality data to train its AI foundation models. The race among AI model developers is transitioning from competition around accumulating more data to the quest for higher-quality data. Data quality has been a key driver in recent benchmark performance improvements of several AI foundation models.

Second, OpenAI would like to provide a better user experience for ChatGPT subscribers by adding more timely news coverage with attribution links. This puts OpenAI on a collision course with Google and the company’s key patron, Microsoft.

Finally, each licensing deal ensures that OpenAI will not be sued for its previous use of content from the publishers in training its earlier models. Though the company believes it had the right to use that public data to train its models, these agreements serve the purpose of reducing the risk of future lawsuits.

This is also more bad news for The New York Times. Instead of cutting a deal with OpenAI, the publisher filed a lawsuit. News publishers’ content varies in quality, and some have niche reporting that may be unique. However, publishers largely deliver similar news. In addition, OpenAI is primarily interested in high-quality content to train its models. Given the breadth of deals that OpenAI has already cut, the value of a deal with The New York Times has surely diminished. OpenAI may still attempt to strike an agreement, but its incentives to bend to the publisher’s demands lessen with every new publisher deal it inks.

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