OpenAI signs content licensing agreement with the Financial Times

OpenAI today announced that it’s partnering with the Financial Times to make articles from the storied newspaper accessible to its large language models.

As part of the collaboration, the companies will make certain Financial Times content available to users of ChatGPT. OpenAI said the deal covers “select attributed summaries, quotes and links to FT journalism.” It didn’t specify when the content will become accessible or in which versions of ChatGPT.

Besides bringing Financial Times articles to the chatbot, OpenAI will also use the content to train new AI models. The deal is part of a broader effort by the company to improve its LLMs using training datasets from third parties. Last November, OpenAI launched a partner program designed to give its LLMs access to external information repositories “that reflect human society.”

OpenAI didn’t disclose the terms of the Financial Times deal. In December, after it inked a similar licensing agreement with Axel Springer, the Wall Street Journal reported that the contract was expected to generate “substantial revenue” for the German publisher. Like the Financial Times, Axel Springer gave OpenAI the right to display summaries of select articles in ChatGPT and train LLMs on its content.

The AI developer has inked similar licensing agreements with several other media companies recently. In March, it announced deals with France’s Le Monde and Madrid-based Prisa Media, which publishes several popular Spanish-language newspapers. OpenAI earlier inked a content deal with the Associated Press.

The company told TechCrunch today that it has signed about a dozen such licensing agreements to date. OpenAI also disclosed that it plans to sign “many more” in the future.

At least some of those contracts, including the ones the company has inked with the Associated Press and Axel Springer, are nonexclusive. That means rival LLM developers have an opportunity to ink content licensing deals of their own. The fact that OpenAI already uses content from the publishers in question to train its models may create a particularly strong incentive for competitors to follow suit.

Google LLC is also making significant investments to expand the amount of text available to its language models. Earlier this year, the search giant disclosed a deal with Reddit Inc. to license content from the social network for use in AI training projects. The contract is reportedly worth more than $60 million per year.

In the case of OpenAI’s partnership with the Financial Times, content licensing is only one component of the deal. The companies will also collaborate to develop new AI features for the newspaper’s readers. Late last month, the Financial Times introduced a generative AI feature that enables users to browse its archive using natural language prompts.

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