Condé Nast and Hearst strike Amazon AI licensing deals for Rufus

A Hearst spokesperson confirmed that Amazon has an AI licensing deal for content to be used within Rufus, across its newspapers and magazines, which include Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar. Condé Nast also confirmed the publisher has a licensing deal for Rufus.

The NYT deal created waves, given the publisher has become known for the hard line it’s taken with OpenAI and Microsoft on copyright theft. Just like the NYT, the terms of the deals with Condé Nast and Hearst are undisclosed, but the first activations on Rufus are expected to go live during the summer. 

Rufus is Amazon’s LLM-powered shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information from across the web, to answer customer questions on shopping needs, products, and comparisons and make related recommendations. It launched last year. 

The New York Times showed it’s playing offence and defense with AI, said Matt Prohaska, CEO and principal of Prohaska Consulting. He added that publishers with shopping-related content are natural bedfellows for Amazon’s LLM ambitions. 

“Amazon created the commerce media category that everyone else has been trying to copy…,” Prohaska said, “the intent and interest in those [Condé Nast and Hearst] publishers and the audiences they bring in, the overlap with shopping is huge, whether it’s home and garden, or fashion and cars or whatever else. So those would be natural places for Amazon to try and lock up.”

The NYT’s announcement of its Amazon AI licensing deal was a signal to the market that publishers are willing to license their content to LLM developers. But to many in the industry, the question remains: what should that price be?

“Commercial models are still evolving. Presumably if the duration of the agreements are limited and all rights return back to the publishers — further presuming it’s possible for an LLM to ‘unlearn’ — the short-term benefits are probably worthwhile,” said Brian Wieser, principal and Madison and Wall.

Wieser noted that if the LLMs are empowered and successful enough in evolving their business models, and able to license content from enough publishers, many individual outlets could find their businesses threatened. “However, it’s all very uncertain,” he added. “It’s likely better to lean into this space and learn — making some money along the way — rather than staying away with nothing gained.”

Rufus, like other LLM-based assistants, needs licensed, structured, brand-safe content to answer questions like: “What’s the best moisturizer for dry skin?,” or “What should I wear to a summer wedding?”, or perhaps “What are good kitchen gadgets under $50?” Lifestyle publishers can provide this context-rich, evergreen content in a way that generic reviews or scraped data can’t.

Condé Nast – home to Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair titles – and Hearst have years of SEO-optimized, structured content — the kind of clean, consistent, high-quality text ideal for AI training. And Amazon will want reliable training data and trustworthy real-world content to avoid hallucinations or inaccurate answers in Rufus and Alexa and other LLM-driven products. 

While few details of the Amazon Rufus deals have been made available, the product recommendations that lifestyle titles like these are packed with, along with gift guides, home hacks and fashion roundups, make them an ideal strategic fit for Amazon because their editorial content naturally maps to consumer intent, making it extremely valuable for powering AI-generated shopping suggestions. 

As Amazon’s Rufus expands its role as a shopping assistant, lifestyle publishers like Condé Nast and Hearst could find themselves integrated directly into the consumer decision journey — not through search, but through AI-driven answers.

It marks a natural extension for Amazon’s AI licensing ambitions. It already has content licensing deals in place with more than 200 publishers, including Condé Nast and Hearst, for its LLM-powered virtual assistant Alexa+, which the platform announced in February. Business Insider, Forbes, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time, Vox and USA Today are also partners. 

 “Alexa+ can manage and protect your home, make reservations, and help you track, discover, and enjoy new artists,” read the press statement. “She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests. Alexa+ does all this and more — all you have to do is ask.”