The New York Times has signed a multi-year agreement to license its editorial and lifestyle content to Amazon.
The deal will allow Amazon’s platforms to tap into news stories, recipes, sports columns and other content published across the New York Times and its various brands, including NYT Cooking and The Athletic, the companies said on Thursday.
Amazon will leverage the Times editorial and lifestyle content to power its artificial intelligence solutions across a number of different products, including its Alexa-enabled smart speakers and screens.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The Times said it was the first licensing agreement to involve their editorial content being repurposed through artificial intelligence tools.
“The deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the CEO of the Times, said in an all-staff memo sent on Thursday. “It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”
The Times has been particularly protective of how its content is used by artificial intelligence tools. Two years ago, the newspaper publisher sued OpenAI and Microsoft after accusing both companies of using Times stories to develop its chatbots, including ChatGPT.
Other news outlets have allowed developers focused on artificial intelligence tools to tap into their content and data sets through licensing agreements, or even for free. Solano Media, the parent company of The Desk, allows a small group of developers to use articles and columns published on this website to train their artificial intelligence models.
Stories from The Desk are also cited by Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool CoPilot when certain queries are made through the search engine Bing; Microsoft financially compensates Solano Media through an editorial partnership, which includes the redistribution of most articles via MSN News.
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Editor’s note: This story was updated Thursday evening to correct a typo in a name.
