OpenAI partners with Schibsted Media Group

OpenAI keeps stacking up media partnerships, and this week it's Schibsted Media Group's turn. The Norwegian publishing giant, which owns titles like Aftenposten and VG and has a footprint across the Nordic region, is letting OpenAI tap its journalism for ChatGPT. That includes current reporting and, notably, archive material stretching back through decades of coverage.

The twist here is the Guardian connection. Under this arrangement, Guardian news and archival content is also being routed into ChatGPT, which suggests the deal covers more than just Schibsted's own newsroom output. It points to a broader content-licensing structure where OpenAI is assembling access through multiple publishers and networks rather than negotiating one outlet at a time.

This fits a pattern OpenAI has been running for over a year now. Axel Springer, Associated Press, News Corp, and a growing list of others have signed similar agreements, each one trading archive and article access for licensing fees and, presumably, some assurance that ChatGPT will surface their reporting with attribution rather than scraping it for free. Schibsted joins that list as one of the more prominent European players, and its archive depth is the real prize. Decades of Nordic reporting on politics, business, and culture is not something a general-purpose model can fake convincingly.

For OpenAI, every deal like this is partly about training data and partly about defusing lawsuits before they start. Publishers have watched AI companies get sued or threatened with suits over unlicensed use of copyrighted material, and licensing deals are the industry's preferred way of avoiding that fight while still getting paid. Whether the payments are meaningful for a company Schibsted's size, or just a rounding error for OpenAI, is not something either side has disclosed.