OpenAI Strikes a Deal to License News Corp Content

News Corp, the Murdoch-owned empire of publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to a deal with OpenAI to share its content to train and service artificial intelligence chatbots. News Corp said the multiyear agreement would allow OpenAI to use current and archived news content from News Corp’s major news outlets, including brands in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia as well as MarketWatch and Barron’s. The agreement does not include content from News Corp’s other businesses, such as its digital real estate services or HarperCollins. “We believe an historic agreement will set new standards for veracity, for virtue and for value in the digital age,” Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, said in a statement. He described OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, as “principled partners” who “understand the commercial and social significance of journalists and journalism.” Mr. Altman described the partnership as “a proud moment for journalism and technology.” The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal reported the agreement could be worth as much as $250 million over five years, citing unnamed sources. A News Corp spokesman declined to comment on the reporting. Tim Martell, a spokesman for the Independent Association of Publishers’ Employees, which represents workers at The Journal, said in a statement that the union was concerned that it had not reached an agreement on A.I. protections in its current contract negotiations before the OpenAI deal was announced. Many publishers have worried about the threat to their business posed by generative A.I., which uses copyrighted content to train its models and service its chatbots. The use of A.I. to answer online search queries in particular has raised concerns that publishers are not being compensated for the use of their content to train chatbots that compete with them as a source of information. In December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of its news articles without authorization. OpenAI and Microsoft have sought to dismiss parts of the complaint. In April, eight daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. Other publishers have sought to negotiate deals with the tech companies. OpenAI has already reached agreements with the German publishing giant Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, The Financial Times and The Associated Press, among others. Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: katie.robertson@nytimes.com More about Katie Robertson Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis — Researchers at the A.I. company Anthropic claim to have found clues about the inner workings of large language models, possibly helping to prevent their misuse and to curb their potential threats. — OpenAI released a chatbot with a voice that sounded like Scarlett Johansson, the actress who provided the voice of an A.I. system in the movie “Her.” Johansson had previously turned down the company’s request to license her voice twice. — Hoping to make the personal computer cool again, Microsoft, HP, Dell and others unveiled a new kind of laptop tailored to work with A.I. The Age of A.I. — D’Youville University in Buffalo had an A.I. robot speak at its commencement. Not everyone was happy about it. — A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors for A.I. careers. — Publishers have long worried that A.I.-generated answers on Google would drive readers away from their sites. They’re about to find out if those fears are warranted, our tech columnist writes. — A new category of apps promises to relieve parents of drudgery, with an assist from A.I. But a family’s grunt work is more human, and valuable, than it seems.