NYTimes Sells Its Soul—Sorry, Archives—to Amazon’s AI in Landmark Deal
Another media giant caves to Big Tech’s cash. The New York Times just inked a deal to license its content—decades of Pulitzer-winning journalism—to train Amazon’s AI models. No price disclosed (but we’re guessing it’s less than a single Jeff Bezos rocket joyride).
Who needs investigative reporters when you’ve got LLMs? The move signals media’s latest pivot from ’Fourth Estate’ to ’Training Data Farm.’ Expect paywalled nostalgia pieces generated by algorithms by Q3.
Wall Street shrugs—another ’synergistic partnership’ that’ll move the needle 0.3% on AMZN’s quarterly earnings call. Meanwhile, journalists polish their ’Prompt Engineering for Dummies’ copies.
The New York Times and AI
In December 2023, the New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against tech giants OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of Times articles without permission to train their AI models.
“OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission” The New York Times said in the lawsuit.
In April, U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein ruled that the lawsuit could proceed, denying OpenAI and Microsoft’s motions to dismiss key claims, including those related to direct and contributory copyright infringement.
Amazon’s AI race
For Amazon, the agreement with the media platform supports its broader effort to catch up in the AI race.
Earlier his month, the company began rolling out Alexa+, a generative AI-powered version of its assistant, to over 100,000 early users.
The system, powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude AI, is designed to be more conversational and aware, and will soon feature curated Times journalism as part of its offering.
Decrypt has reached out to both Amazon and The New York Times with requests for comment.
