OpenAI Signs Content Agreement With Time

OpenAI has signed another content deal with a major publishing house and content creator, as it continues to licence access to media content for AI training.

The AI pioneer announced it had reached a “strategic content partnership with Time”, which will provide it access to “current and historic content from Time’s extensive archives from the last 101 years to enhance OpenAI products and display in response to user inquiries.”

OpenAI has been busy so far this year signing content deals, including News Corp, Reddit, Financial Time and other media publishers.

Time agreement

According to both OpenAI and Time, the agreement between the two parties is “a multi-year content deal and strategic partnership to bring TIME’s trusted journalism to OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

OpenAI said this collaboration will give it access to current and historic content from Time’s extensive archives from the last 101 years, which will be used to enhance its products and display in response to user inquiries.

This will also allow ChatGPT to feature a citation and link back to the original source on Time.com.

“Throughout our 101-year history, Time has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology,” said Time CEO Mark Howard. “This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing Time’s journalism to audiences globally.”

“We’re partnering with Time to make it easier for people to access news content through our AI tools, and to support reputable journalism by providing proper attribution to original sources,” said Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer at OpenAI.

The partnership it seems is also a two way street, as it will also enable Time to gain access to OpenAI’s technology.

Content deals

OpenAI has signed similar content agreements with a range of firms.

Last month OpenAI signed content deals with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and social media platform Reddit.

Also in May 2024, OpenAI signed content and product partnerships with The Atlantic and Vox Media.

OpenAI also signed an agreement to license content from the Financial Times for the development of AI models.

OpenAI has also signed content deals with other online presences over the past year, including German media publisher Axel Springer, the Associated Press, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media.

Content lawsuits

It comes after OpenAI has faced a number of lawsuits alleging unauthorised access to journalist content in order to train its AI models.

In February 2024 three online news outlets in the United States, filed legal action seeking at least $2,500 in damages for each time one of their stories has been used by ChatGPT.

That complaint came from The Intercept (an online American non-profit news organisation); Raw Story (an American progressive news website); and AlterNet (a left leaning news website in the US).

Prior to that in December 2023 the New York Times became the first major US media organisation to sue OpenAI (and its main investor Microsoft).

That NYT lawsuit did not include an exact monetary demand, but is seeking billions of dollars as compensation. The lawsuit cited several instances in which OpenAI and Microsoft chatbots gave users near-verbatim excerpts of NYT articles.

Shortly after the NYT lawsuit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in January expressed his surprise, saying OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models didn’t need to train on the publisher’s data.