Major AI & Media Collaboration: The New York Times Partners with Amazon

In a landmark move, The New York Times has signed a multiyear licensing agreement with Amazon, granting the tech giant access to a wide range of its editorial content for integration into various AI-driven platforms.

This includes access to:

Real-time and archived news articles

Lifestyle content from NYT Cooking

Sports journalism from The Athletic

What makes this deal significant is that it’s The Times’s first agreement focused specifically on generative AI. The content will be used not only for informing users via Alexa-enabled devices but also for training Amazon’s proprietary AI and AGI models.

This partnership comes at a crucial moment in the AI landscape, where major players are hitting data limitations and facing increased scrutiny over how training data is acquired. In fact, in 2023, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging unauthorized use of its content for model training — a case that is still unfolding.

Amazon, meanwhile, is expanding its AI capabilities aggressively. Beyond internal developments, it has:

Invested $4 billion in Anthropic, a leading AI startup

Gained deep access to Anthropic’s foundation models

Integrated these models into AWS cloud services and AI infrastructure

The licensing deal with The Times positions Amazon to not only enhance its consumer AI tools like Alexa but also to deepen its efforts in building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

This could shape the future of how journalism, voice assistants, and generative AI intersect.

Author: Sania Khan