Amazon and The New York Times’ AI deal signals a new wave of publisher partnerships

It’s a sign of the times: even The New York Times, long known for its staunch defense against illegal content scraping and its high-profile legal battle with OpenAI, has signaled that it’s open to an AI licensing deal — if the terms are right.

The deal, announced by NYT last Thursday, is akin to both Amazon and the publisher openly declaring they too are all-in on the AI race. 

The New York Times is signaling to other AI tech companies, “We’re open to being at the table, if you’re willing to come to the table,” one former NYT executive told Digiday on condition of anonymity. “Until [this] announcement, they’ve been sort of hiding in the shadows. Now they’re saying, ‘we’re open for business under the right terms and conditions.’”

The same exec said they believe the agreement with Amazon represents a “new wave” of deals between large digital publishers and AI licensing deals to come. Digiday understands that at least one other publisher cut a licensing deal with Amazon last year, and that more will emerge in the coming months. But Amazon has kept its negotiations with publishers under lock and key.

Amazon’s courting of news publishers for potential AI licensing partnerships to feed quality content into a smarter version of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant product, was first reported last December. Alexa currently provides answers to news queries from sources like Reuters, Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, but not in real time.

But The New York Times’ announcement was vague on whether its content would help power the new Alexa+. “Amazon’s use of editorial content from The Times could extend to the Alexa software found on its smart speakers,” it read. 

What enticed NYT to go with Amazon? 

The fact that The New York Times’ content will now be used to train Amazon’s AI models could strengthen its copyright case against OpenAI. It implies that using this content without a deal in place “may not be a fair use,” according to Aaron Rubin, partner in the Strategic Transactions & Licensing group at law firm Gunderson Dettmer. 

“It also further establishes that there’s a market for licensing this content for model training purposes, so any party that trains its model with [The Times’] content without licensing it is undercutting that market,” he said.

The New York Times declined to answer questions about the differences between its differing associations with OpenAI and Amazon, and why it would sign with Amazon and sue OpenAI. Amazon also declined to comment.

Amazon may seem like an unlikely partner for The New York Times’ first AI licensing deal. The New York Times is arguably in a league of its own, with a large and growing subscription and digital advertising business. And Amazon’s large language model Nova isn’t exactly a household name – at least not as popular as OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s LLama. (Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic.) 

Naturally, without further detail being disclosed, it’s hard to say for sure. But Amazon uses its AI models primarily for voice products like Alexa, and for its Amazon shopping assistant Rufus – not text-based products like Google or OpenAI’s search products, said a publishing exec at a large digital publisher who requested anonymity. Whereas, Google’s AI Mode or ChatGPT “are both more likely to cannibalize material traffic,” for The New York Times, they said.

The New York Times has a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, so a partnership with either of those companies would’ve been quite the one-eighty. Perplexity has been actively pursuing deals with publishers, but for a wider range of publishers, such as its revenue share agreements with Time to Blavity. 

Google would have made sense as an AI licensing partner for The New York Times, given it’s already signed large, multi-year deals with The New York Times and made an agreement in January with The Associated Press to bring its news to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

The New York Times isn’t the only publisher to offer a carrot in one hand and a stick in the other. News Corp signed a licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024. Five months later, its Dow Jones and the New York Post businesses filed a lawsuit against Perplexity

In an earnings call in November 2024, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said the company would “seek to challenge AI companies misusing and abusing our trusted journalism.”

“We have indicated in the past that we would prefer to woo rather than sue artificial intelligence companies, hence the alliance with OpenAI, but we have reached a point where litigation is also essential,” he continued. “Perplexity… is selling products based on our journalism, and we are diligently preparing for further action against other companies that have ingested our archives and are synthesizing our intellectual property.” News Corp did not respond to a request for comment before publishing time.

Regardless, The New York Times is no longer in the increasingly short list of large digital publishers that haven’t signed an AI licensing deal yet. Bustle Digital Group, CNN and Bloomberg to name a few.

“I think that the bigger picture is that everyone’s open for business at the right price. The question is, what’s the right price?” said Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall. “This is not the first deal of this nature to be cut and it sure won’t be the last.”

Jessica Davies contributed reporting.