The New York Times Signs AI Content Licensing Deal with Amazon

The New York Times has entered into a multi-year agreement with Amazon to license its newsroom content for artificial intelligence (AI) training, marking a major shift in the media giant’s approach to generative AI partnerships.

Announced Thursday, the deal grants Amazon access to decades of content from the Times, including material from The Athletic and NYT Cooking, to enhance the performance of its AI tools. The licensed content will be used across Amazon products and services – such as Alexa – to generate real-time summaries and excerpts, with appropriate attribution and links to original Times stories.

According to a joint statement, the partnership aims to expand the reach of the Times’s journalism by integrating it into emerging AI experiences while preserving editorial standards. Amazon said the content will be presented in a way that reflects the Times’s journalistic integrity and includes direct links to original articles when relevant.

“This collaboration will make our original journalism more accessible to a broader audience through Amazon’s AI-enabled platforms,” said Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien in a memo to staff. She added that the deal reflects the Times’s core belief that high-quality journalism must be compensated fairly, either through licensing or legal enforcement of intellectual property.

While financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, the deal represents a broader strategy by publishers to monetise their archives amid growing concern that AI models are being trained on copyrighted content without permission or compensation. A Times spokesperson noted that the company remains open to partnerships with other tech firms, provided they fairly value and respect its work.

This new alliance contrasts sharply with the Times’s recent legal stance on AI. In December 2023, the publisher filed a landmark lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of improperly using millions of its articles to train AI models such as ChatGPT without authorization.

Despite that legal action, the Times’s willingness to license content to Amazon highlights a nuanced strategy: pursue legal redress where necessary, but collaborate when the terms are right. The paper’s podcasts are already distributed via Amazon Music, underscoring the companies’ ongoing business relationship.

The Times joins a growing list of media organizations – including the Associated Press, Reuters, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post – that have formalized licensing deals with AI companies. Meanwhile, others like Ziff Davis and publications under Alden Global Capital have taken their grievances to court over similar copyright concerns.

As generative AI tools become more mainstream, such deals signal a push by publishers to secure compensation while asserting control over how their content is used in AI-driven environments.