The New York Times announced on 29 May 2025 that it has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with Amazon, allowing the tech giant to use the publisher's news, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic content across its AI platforms and services, including the Alexa assistant. Under the agreement, Amazon can display real-time excerpts and summaries of Times content in various products and use them to train its proprietary foundation models, while the publisher had filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in 2023 for similar practices, recording $4.4 million in pretax litigation costs in the first quarter of 2025.
The licensing deal can be understood as part of AI companies' efforts to overcome difficulties in improving their large language models after exhausting easily accessible data, necessitating new partnerships, as demonstrated by OpenAI's 2023 initiative to seek access to public and private datasets, resulting in agreements with publishers such as the Financial Times, Axel Springer, Le Monde, Prisa Media, and Time magazine. Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of The New York Times Company, emphasised in an internal memo to staff that the deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for and 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.
The Times-Amazon collaboration forms part of a broader trend in which numerous news organisations, including the Washington Post, Guardian Media Group, Agence France-Presse, the Associated Press, Axios, Reuters, Hearst, and the Financial Times, have struck similar licensing deals with AI companies, counterbalancing the issue that chatbots often provide in-app answers, reducing traffic to publishers' websites. Amazon, as the world's largest cloud computing company with the necessary computing power but previously lagging in the AI race, has made several significant moves to improve its position: licensing Adept's technology for at least $330 million in 2024, making a similar deal with the Covariant startup, and investing $4 billion in Anthropic, one of OpenAI's chief rivals.
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The New York Times has entered its first generative‑AI licensing agreement with Amazon
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Liam Reilly
