Amazon Pays Millions to Train AI on Top US Newspaper's Content

According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, tech behemoth Amazon has struck a multi-year deal with the New York Times to access the newspaper's content and use it to train the company's AI models. The agreement, signed in May of this year, will see Amazon pay the NYT between $20 to $25 million per year for the rights to leverage the publication's core news coverage, as well as its cooking and sports platforms.

While the partnership was publicly announced at the time, the financial terms were not disclosed until now. The deal represents a significant milestone for both parties, as it is the NYT's first licensing agreement focused specifically on AI, and Amazon's inaugural such agreement with a news publisher.

Under the terms of the deal, Amazon can utilize the licensed material to enhance its AI models and incorporate summaries and excerpts from NYT content into various products and services, including its Alexa virtual assistant. This arrangement signals a new revenue stream for publishers, who can now monetize their journalistic content directly through AI training, rather than relying solely on advertising or subscription models.

The agreement also comes amid growing legal tensions between publishers and AI developers. In December 2023, the NYT filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement by using the newspaper's articles without permission to train their AI models, including the popular ChatGPT. The publishers argue that AI-generated summaries could bypass paywalls and reduce web traffic.