The New York Times has agreed to a significant multi-year licensing deal with Amazon, allowing the tech giant to utilize its extensive editorial content to train Amazon's artificial intelligence platforms and enhance customer experiences across various Amazon products. This agreement, announced on May 29, 2025, marks a pivotal moment for both companies in the evolving landscape of AI and media.

Under the terms of this arrangement, Amazon will gain access to a wide array of content from The New York Times, including its news articles, material from its popular food and recipe site NYT Cooking, and content from its sports-focused publication, The Athletic. This content will be used for multiple purposes, such as providing summaries and short excerpts in Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and, crucially, for training Amazon's AI models. Amazon has indicated that when appropriate within the consumer experience, it will provide direct links back to The Times's products, enabling readers to access the full content and ensuring The Times can maintain its reader engagement.

This deal is particularly noteworthy as it comes nearly two years after The New York Times initiated a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. In that ongoing legal battle, The Times accused the two tech companies of unlawfully using millions of its published articles to train their AI models, such as ChatGPT, without consent or compensation. The lawsuit alleges that this unauthorized use deprived the publication of significant revenue streams, including subscriptions, licensing, advertising, and affiliate fees. Both OpenAI and Microsoft have denied these allegations.

For The New York Times, this agreement with Amazon marks its first foray into a licensing arrangement specifically focused on generative AI. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for The Times, emphasized the company's "long-standing approach to ensure that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights." This deal aligns with that strategy, providing a new avenue for monetizing its journalism and asserting the value of its content in the age of AI.

While this is a pioneering agreement for Amazon in terms of licensing news content for AI training, OpenAI has already established similar partnerships with several other prominent publishers. These include The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, NewsCorp, and Axel Springer, indicating a growing trend of collaboration and negotiation between AI developers and media organizations seeking to define the terms of content usage.

Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of The New York Times Company, articulated the publisher's perspective in a note to staff, stating that the deal "is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for." She further added that it "aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights."

The financial terms of the deal between The New York Times and Amazon have not been publicly disclosed. This agreement underscores a broader industry dynamic where some publishers are pursuing legal action against AI companies for copyright infringement, while others, and sometimes the same ones, are opting for licensing deals. Several other media outlets, such as The Intercept, Raw Story, CBC/Radio-Canada, and the owner of IGN and CNET, have also sued OpenAI on similar grounds. Conversely, publishers like The Atlantic, News Corp, and The Verge parent company Vox Media have also struck AI licensing deals, highlighting diverse strategies within the media industry.

Amazon's AI-upgraded Alexa Plus, which was launched in early access earlier this year, is expected to benefit from this infusion of high-quality content. The company claims that "hundreds of thousands of customers" have already tried the enhanced assistant. This partnership between The New York Times and Amazon highlights the increasing importance of premium, authoritative content for the development and refinement of sophisticated AI models and AI-powered consumer products, signaling a potential pathway for future collaborations in the sector.