OpenAI has formed partnerships with publishers including the Financial Times, Axel Springer, and News Corp., the owner of The Wall Street Journal. Elsewhere, AI-powered search engine Perplexity has launched a program that allows publishers to earn incremental revenue when their content is referenced in results.
Several of these deals have a training component. Publishers like Condé Nast have agreed to let AI vendors with which they have a licensing agreement train AI models on their archives. The AI industry has largely pitched these arrangements as a service to journalism, but they’re also designed to shield AI companies from copyright infringement claims.