Axel Springer strikes landmark deal with OpenAI over access to news titles

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Axel Springer will allow OpenAI to train artificial intelligence models using content from the German publishing giant’s outlets such as Bild, Politico and Business Insider, in a landmark deal for the global media industry.

Under the agreement struck with ChatGPT-owner, the German group will earn tens of millions of euros a year to allow its news content to develop generative AI technology that can create text, images and code that are indistinguishable from human creations. 

Axel Springer will also allow near real time access to its news stories to allow the AI platform to provide current answers to questions from its users. 

These will be provided in short summaries generated from news articles with links back to its websites, as well as longer and more fully developed answers. In effect, this will mean that users can access its news content via ChatGPT, albeit with links to the original source material.

Axel Springer will receive a one-off payment for its historical content that will be used to train the AI technology for the first time, but the larger fee will be paid under an annual licence agreement that will allow OpenAI to access more up-to-date information.

The companies have not disclosed how much is being paid but one person close to the deal described it as an annual “eight digit” sum.

The deal marks the most significant shift yet by a large publishing group in their dealings with the makers of chatbots and other generative AI products that threaten to disrupt to the global media industry.

Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, said that the deal was “the first of its kind”. He added: “We want to explore the opportunities of AI-empowered journalism — to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level.”

Axel Springer said it would become the first publishing group globally to agree a deal with OpenAI that “explicitly values the publisher’s role in contributing to OpenAI’s products”. 

Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, said it was “deeply committed to working with publishers and creators around the world and ensuring they benefit from advanced AI technology and new revenue models”. 

Earlier this year, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Adobe met news executives from publishers including News Corp, Axel Springer, The New York Times, The Guardian and the Financial Times, to discuss issues around their AI products, according to several people familiar with the talks.

Media executives raised alarm over the threat to publishers posed by the rising use of AI, with concerns that technology groups are accessing their data and content to ‘train’ answers and responses without permission. 

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said that “[media’s] collective IP is under threat” given that readers might no longer use news websites and instead find information through AI-generated answers. 

Media groups have struggled with finding the right way to be paid for their content, with fears that once they open the door to AI then their content will be devalued. 

They want to prevent the sorts of damage to their business models caused by sharing articles online for free with groups such as Google and Facebook that used them to build multibillion-dollar online advertising businesses during the early years of the internet.

Axel Springer said that the deal was important “strategically for us as this creates a revenue stream from an AI provider to us as a publisher — taking a more considered approach than back in the day when Google, Facebook and the likes came into the fold and publishers were deers in the headlights”.