The New York Times Company will license its extensive editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms. The agreement, a first for The Times concerning generative AI, includes news articles, NYT Cooking recipes, and The Athletic sports coverage. The news organization stated the deal aims to “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences.”
This collaborative venture with Amazon emerges even as The Times pursues a significant copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, initiated in December 2023. This dual approach highlights a complex strategy: monetizing journalism through AI partnerships while vigorously defending intellectual property via litigation. Such moves signal evolving news consumption dynamics and the financial tightrope media organizations must navigate.
Meredith Kopit Levien, chief executive of The Times, emphasized the deal’s alignment with their principles, stating, “The deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for.”
She added, “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.” Financial terms were not disclosed, but The Times’s content will also help train Amazon’s proprietary AI models.
A Dual Strategy: Licensing And Litigation
The New York Times’s decision to partner with Amazon provides a fascinating counterpoint to its ongoing legal confrontations. Beyond the prominent lawsuit targeting OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly misusing millions of articles to train models like ChatGPT and Copilot, The Times also issued a cease and desist letter to Perplexity AI in October 2024. The AI startup, backed by Jeff Bezos, faces accusations of unauthorized content summarization.
The core of The Times’s legal argument against OpenAI and Microsoft is that their AI tools diminish the value of its journalism. Specifically, the publisher claims these tools bypass its paywall and negatively impact revenue streams, such as its Wirecutter affiliate review site. The financial stakes are considerable, with The Times having reportedly invested $7.6 million in legal costs by November 2024.
The Copyright Battleground: Arguments And Developments
Defendants OpenAI and Microsoft maintain their AI training practices constitute fair use. Microsoft, in court filings, argued that “Copyright law is no more an obstacle to the LLM than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet, or search engine).”
OpenAI has asserted that its models synthesize publicly available information and are not designed to replicate entire articles, further alleging that The Times conducted manipulative testing to elicit near-verbatim excerpts from ChatGPT to produce near-verbatim outputs. An OpenAI lawyer, Joseph Gratz, explained that ChatGPT breaks down source material into smaller text units to identify patterns, not to “regurgitate entire articles.”
Conversely, The Times’s attorney Ian Crosby argued during a January 2025 hearing that AI tools are “about replacing the content, not transforming it.” Adding another layer to the legal saga, a U.S. judicial panel decided in April 2025 to consolidate several copyright lawsuits, including The Times’s, against OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court consolidation of lawsuits.
The panel stated this would “serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses and promote the just and efficient conduct of this litigation.” Reacting to this, an OpenAI spokesperson said, “We welcome this development and look forward to making it clear in court that our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation.”
This consolidation followed a March 2025 ruling where a judge allowed The Times’s main allegations to proceed, with attorney Steven Lieberman stating to NPR, “We appreciate the opportunity to present a jury with the facts about how OpenAI and Microsoft are profiting wildly from stealing the original content of newspapers across the country,”.
Broader Industry Reactions And AI’s Future In Media
The AI landscape sees varied reactions from publishers. Perplexity AI, for its part, claims it indexes publicly available web pages for citation-based responses, with a spokesperson stating, “We believe in transparency”. CEO Aravind Srinivas previously said “we have no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here” and also remarked that “factual information shouldn’t be monopolized.”
Despite these assertions and Perplexity’s revenue-sharing initiatives Perplexity has implemented revenue-sharing initiatives, it has faced prior accusations of content misuse from outlets like Forbes and Wired have previously accused the startup of replicating their articles.
While some publishers pursue litigation, others, including TIME, The Atlantic, and Vox Media, have opted for licensing deals with AI developers like OpenAI. These agreements offer an alternative path, balancing AI’s potential with content protection.
However, uncertainty persists, compounded by unfulfilled promises, such as OpenAI’s “Media Manager” tool, which was intended to give publishers more content control but has not been delivered so far.
