Partnership with Axel Springer to deepen beneficial use of AI in journalism
OpenAI
OpenAI just teamed up with Axel Springer, the publisher behind Politico and Business Insider, to feed real journalism into ChatGPT. It's the first deal of its kind — a sign AI companies need news outlets as much as news outlets fear them.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI has struck a deal with Axel Springer, the German media giant that owns Politico, Business Insider, Bild, and Welt, making it the first publisher anywhere to strike this kind of arrangement. The partnership lets ChatGPT surface summaries of Axel Springer's journalism, complete with attribution and links back to the original stories, so users asking about current events get answers grounded in reported news rather than whatever scraps the model picked up during training.
This isn't charity. OpenAI gets access to high-quality, current reporting to train future models on, which matters a lot given how badly large language models struggle with anything that happened after their training cutoff. Axel Springer, in turn, gets paid for content that OpenAI's systems have arguably already been ingesting for free, plus a new distribution channel reaching hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users.
The timing tracks with a broader shift in how AI companies talk about publishers. A year ago the posture from most AI labs was closer to 'we'll figure out licensing later, maybe.' Lawsuits from the New York Times and others changed the incentive structure fast. Striking a public deal with attribution and compensation baked in lets OpenAI point to something concrete when critics accuse it of laundering other people's journalism into free chatbot answers.
Axel Springer, for its part, has leaned hard into digital transformation for years under CEO Mathias Döpfner, and this fits that pattern — betting that partnering with the disruptor beats fighting it in court, at least for now. Whether other big publishers follow with similar deals, or hold out for litigation to set a higher price, will probably shape how this whole relationship between AI and the news industry gets written for the next few years.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I think this deal is Axel Springer taking the smart money now instead of gambling on a lawsuit payout later, and I don't blame them. But let's not pretend this fixes the underlying tension: OpenAI still needs a constant supply of fresh, credible reporting to keep its models useful, and one publisher's licensing fee doesn't answer the question of what happens to smaller outlets that can't cut deals like this and just get quietly summarized out of existence.
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