A landmark multi-year global partnership with News Corp
OpenAI
OpenAI just signed a multi-year deal with News Corp to license journalism from outlets like WSJ and the NY Post for its AI products. Translation: ChatGPT gets premium news content, and publishers get paid instead of scraped.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Sam Altman's OpenAI have struck a multi-year licensing agreement that lets the AI company feed its models with journalism from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Barron's, MarketWatch and other News Corp titles. Neither side disclosed the dollar figure, but reports elsewhere have pegged similar OpenAI media deals in the tens of millions annually, so this one is likely no small line item.
The mechanics matter here. Rather than OpenAI hoovering up articles through web scraping and hoping nobody notices or sues, this is a formal, paid arrangement where News Corp content gets surfaced in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products with actual permission. That's a meaningful shift from the earlier, murkier era when publishers were discovering their work inside training data without so much as a heads up, let alone a check.
News Corp isn't new to this fight. The company has been openly hostile toward AI firms that it believes are freeriding on journalism, and it's currently suing Perplexity AI in a separate case over unauthorized use of content. So this OpenAI deal reads less like a warm partnership and more like a negotiated truce, the kind media companies increasingly seem to prefer over prolonged litigation with uncertain outcomes.
For OpenAI, the calculus is straightforward. Its products live and die on the quality and credibility of the information they surface, and stitching in premium, fact-checked journalism from major outlets is a direct answer to critics who say chatbots spit out confident nonsense. And for News Corp, it's a new revenue stream at a moment when print advertising keeps shrinking and traffic from search engines is getting squeezed by AI answer boxes that skip the click entirely.
This follows a pattern other publishers have already tested, including Axel Springer and the Associated Press, both of which cut similar licensing deals with OpenAI over the past year. Whether this becomes the industry norm or just a stopgap while lawsuits like the New York Times case against OpenAI play out in court is still an open question.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I'll say what I always say: this is publishers picking the coward's exit ramp instead of forcing a real reckoning over what training data is worth. A licensing check today buys OpenAI legal cover and a content pipeline cheaply, while journalism outlets trade long-term leverage for short-term cash, the same mistake they made with Google and Facebook a decade ago. Watch the New York Times lawsuit closely, because that's the case that will actually set the price, not these quiet side deals.
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