Financial Times signs licensing deal with OpenAI

The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content and develop AI tools, the latest news organization to work with the AI company. 

The FT writes in a press release that ChatGPT users will see summaries, quotes, and links to its articles. Any prompt that returns information from the FT will be attributed to the publication. 

In return, OpenAI will work with the news organization to develop new AI products. The FT already uses OpenAI products, saying it is a customer of ChatGPT Enterprise. Last month, the FT released a generative AI search function on beta powered by Anthropic’s Claude large language model. Ask FT lets subscribers find information across the publication’s articles. 

Financial Times Group CEO John Ridding says that even as the company partners with OpenAI, the publication continues to commit to “human journalism.”

“It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material,” Ridding says. He adds that “it’s clearly in the interests of users that these products contain reliable sources.”

OpenAI has made several deals with news organizations to license content to train AI models. Axel Springer, which publishes Business Insider, Politico, and the European publications Bild and Welt, signed a similar agreement with OpenAI to pull data from its articles. The Associated Press also allows OpenAI to train its models on their data. However, OpenAI reportedly offers between $1 million and $5 million to license content from publications, significantly less than what other companies like Apple are offering. 

Other news organizations have a much different relationship with OpenAI. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement in December 2023, alleging that ChatGPT “recites Times content verbatim.” The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet filed a separate lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft with similar allegations in February.