OpenAI signs an explosive agreement with Axel Springer for the formation of its model through an exclusive news license

OpenAI announces partnership with Axel Springer to train its generative AI models

OpenAI announced today that it has reached an agreement with Axel Springer, owner of publications such as Business Insider and Politico, to train its generative AI models on the publisher's content and add recent articles published by Axel Springer to OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot.

This is the second such agreement OpenAI has signed with a news organization, after announcing that it would license certain Associated Press archives for the training of its models.

In future, ChatGPT users will receive abstracts of "selected" articles from Axel Springer publications, including articles normally reserved for subscribers. The abstracts will be accompanied by attributions and links to the full articles.

In exchange, Axel Springer will receive payments of unspecified size and frequency from OpenAI. The agreement is valid for several years and, although it does not commit either party to exclusivity, Axel Springer declares that it will support the publisher's existing initiatives based on OpenAI's technology.

"We are delighted to have shaped this global partnership between Axel Springer and OpenAI - the first of its kind," said Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer. "We want to explore the opportunities offered by AI-powered journalism - to take the quality, societal relevance and business model of journalism to the next level."

Tense relations between publishers and vendors of generative AI

Apart from publishers using generative AI for dubious content strategies, relations between publishers and generative AI vendors are strained. Publishers allege copyright infringement and are increasingly concerned that generative models are cannibalizing their traffic. For example, Google's new generative AI-powered search experience, called SGE, has pushed links appearing in traditional search results further down the search results pages, potentially reducing traffic to these links by as much as 40%.

Publishers also object to vendors training their models on their content without compensation agreements, especially in light of reports that tech giants such as Google are experimenting with AI tools to summarize news. According to a recent survey, hundreds of news organizations are now using code to prevent OpenAI, Google and others from scanning their websites for training data.

Call for greater transparency and copyright protection

In August, several media organizations, including Getty Images, the Associated Press, the National Press Photographers Association and The Authors Guild, published an open letter calling for greater transparency and copyright protection in the AI field. In the letter, the signatories urged policymakers to consider regulations that require transparency of training datasets and allow media companies to negotiate with AI model operators, among other suggestions.

"[Current practices] undermine the media industry's fundamental business models, which are based on audience (such as subscriptions), licensing and advertising," the letter reads. "In addition to violating copyright law, the resulting impact is to significantly reduce media diversity and undermine the financial viability of companies to invest in media coverage, thereby reducing public access to high-quality, reliable information."