The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has gone into business with artificial-intelligence powerhouse OpenAI.
The Post said it entered into a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI to make the newspaper’s content “more accessible” in ChatGPT. Under the agreement, ChatGPT will display summaries, quotes and links to original reporting from the Washington Post in response to relevant search queries. ChatGPT will featur the Post’s content across politics, global affairs, business, technology and more, “always with clear attribution and direct links to full articles,” the newspaper said.
According to the Post, the partnership with OpenAI “reflects a shared commitment to making reliable, factual information easier to find and engage with, especially on complex or fast-moving topics, where timely, well-sourced reporting, like that of The Post, matters most.”
According to OpenAI the deal is similar to partnerships it has formed with more than 20 news publishers, bringing its technology to more than 160 outlets and “hundreds of content brands” in more than 20 languages. Those partners include News Corp, the Associated Press, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, LeMonde, Prisa Media, Time, Vox Media and Condé Nast. In another camp are the New York Times and other newspapers, which have sued OpenAI as well as Microsoft, alleging the tech companies engaged in copyright infringement by using the publishers’ content to train their AI systems.
In a statement, Peter Elkins-Williams, head of global partnerships at the Washington Post, said, “We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are. Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it.”
OpenAI says that more than 500 million people use ChatGPT weekly for searches. Varun Shetty, head of media partnerships at OpenAI, said in a statement, “By investing in high-quality journalism by partners like The Washington Post, we’re helping ensure our users get timely, trustworthy information when they need it.”
This past year, the Washington Post launched generative AI experiments “built by news for news,” including Ask the Post AI and Climate Answers. The paper says it also has “broadened its coverage accessibility for users” through AI-powered summaries and audio. “The Post continues to be LLM-agnostic as it embraces and builds its own range of AI-powered solutions for both its business and its users,” the company said.
