The New York Times has signed a multiyear licensing agreement with Amazon to integrate its content into Amazon’s AI-powered products and services.

This is the Times’ first agreement with an AI company regarding its journalism.

Under the deal, Amazon will access editorial content from the Times, including its cooking app and The Athletic, for real-time query responses and to train Amazon’s large language models.

This move comes as news organizations explore partnerships with AI firms, while some pursue legal action against others. The New York Times is currently involved in copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft.

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🔗 Source: Axios

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Media companies adopt dual strategy of licensing and litigation in AI era

The NYT’s strategy of licensing content to Amazon while simultaneously suing OpenAI and Microsoft reflects a calculated industry response to AI’s disruption of traditional publishing.

This dual approach has become increasingly common, with News Corp striking a lucrative five-year deal with OpenAI while suing Perplexity, and similar patterns from The Atlantic, Condé Nast, and Politico’s parent Axel Springer 1.

Media organizations are effectively creating a two-tier system: authorized partners who pay for content access versus unauthorized AI companies they target with copyright infringement claims 2.

This mirrors historical media transitions, as publishers initially resisted digital aggregators like Google News before eventually developing licensing arrangements. Now, the stakes are higher as AI can potentially replace rather than merely link to original content 3.

The evolving landscape has prompted the Copyright Clearance Center to expand its licensing offerings specifically for AI rights, signaling the institutionalization of this new revenue stream 1.

2️⃣ Financial dynamics of AI content licensing reveal emerging market standards

The NYT-Amazon deal joins a growing list of high-value AI licensing agreements that are reshaping media economics, with deals like News Corp’s reported $250 million arrangement with OpenAI setting precedents for content valuation 4.

These negotiations typically include both training data access and the right to display content excerpts, creating multiple revenue streams from the same intellectual property 2.

The financial impact is significant enough that Shutterstock reportedly generated $138 million in AI licensing revenue in 2024, followed by Reddit at $130 million, demonstrating how content archives are being monetized in ways impossible just a few years ago 5.

Media companies are experimenting with various compensation models, including fixed payments, usage-based fees, and revenue-sharing arrangements, as the industry searches for sustainable standards 6.

These licensing deals represent a strategic pivot for publishers who initially faced an existential threat from AI but are now finding ways to convert their content libraries into valuable training assets for AI development 7.

3️⃣ Publishers evolve from early AI journalism experiments to strategic partners

The NYT’s licensing deal with Amazon represents a significant evolution from the media industry’s early relationship with AI, which began with simple automation tools like AP’s use of Automated Insights technology in 2014 to scale from 300 to 3,700 earnings reports quarterly 8.

Early AI journalism applications focused primarily on automating routine content creation, with Bloomberg’s Cyborg system generating thousands of financial articles and the Washington Post’s Heliograf covering predictable events like sports and elections 8.

Publishers initially approached AI as an internal productivity tool, but have now recognized the value of their content archives as essential training data for more sophisticated AI systems, shifting from being users of basic AI to critical suppliers for advanced systems 3.

This transition reflects media companies’ growing understanding that quality journalistic content provides unique value for AI training that synthetic or web-scraped alternatives cannot match, creating leverage in licensing negotiations 9.

The relationship has thus evolved from media companies experimenting with AI tools to becoming strategic partners in AI development, with carefully negotiated boundaries to protect their core business models 7.

Recent Amazon developments

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