ChatGPT owner signs giant licensing deals

OpenAI said it has inked licensing agreements with The Atlantic and Vox Media, the latest in a flurry of deals the startup has made with publishers to support the development of its artificial intelligence products.

As part of the deals, OpenAI will be able to display news from The Atlantic and Vox Media — which owns The Verge and New York Magazine, among other news outlets — in products like ChatGPT.

The startup can also use the publishers’ content to train its AI models.

Financial terms of the deals weren’t disclosed.

In recent weeks, OpenAI has announced partnerships with several prominent publishers in the US and Europe, including News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal; Dotdash Meredith, which publishes People Magazine; and The Financial Times.

The deals coincide with pushback from authors and publishers who say OpenAI has scraped their work to build its AI tools.

In separate statements, executives from The Atlantic and Vox said the agreements will make it easier for readers to discover work from their publications.

“We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future,” said Nicholas Thompson, chief executive officer at The Atlantic.

“We’re delighted to partner with OpenAI to make The Atlantic’s reporting and stories more discoverable to their millions of users and to have a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms.”

The two publishers also stressed that the deals will give them access to the startup’s technology and help them build products for readers.

The Atlantic, for example, is developing an initiative dubbed Atlantic Labs, which will focus on AI-powered products using technology from OpenAI and other companies.