Report: Amazon to pay at least $20M a year in AI content deal with New York Times

Amazon’s deal to license some content from The New York Times for use on the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms will cost at least $20 million annually, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The Journal cited “people familiar with the matter” in reporting the figure, which hadn’t been publicly disclosed since the two companies announced their plans in May. The report said the yearly payment — as high as $25 million — amounts to nearly 1% of the Times’s total 2024 revenue.

The multi-year licensing agreement will bring Times editorial content “to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the Times previously said. Content will include “real-time display of summaries and short excerpts” of news articles and items from NYT Cooking (food and cooking) and The Athletic (sports).

Amazon could also use Times original content in the Alexa software on its smart speakers and to train its proprietary AI models.

The generative-AI focused licensing arrangement is a first for the Times.

“The [Amazon] deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief executive of the Times, previously said in a note to staff.

The New York Times Co. filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against both OpenAI and its partner Microsoft in December 2023, accusing the tech companies of “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”

The suit alleges that the companies wrongly used vast amounts of copyrighted material from the newspaper to train the large language models that power ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence models.

A federal judge rejected parts of OpenAI and Microsoft’s motion to dismiss the suit in April, writing that the Times’ produced “numerous” and “widely publicized” examples of ChatGPT producing material from its articles.

OpenAI has licensing deals with other publishers, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and NewsCorp.