Who Licensed What to OpenAI, and for How Much
The deals on the record, deal by deal
Six publishers signed. What each disclosed ranges from a headline figure to nothing.
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A small but growing roster of publishers has moved from threatening litigation to signing licensing agreements with OpenAI, trading archive access for fees and, in several cases, product integrations. The terms are rarely disclosed in full, but enough has leaked through regulatory filings, press releases, and reported figures to allow a side-by-side comparison of what is publicly known.
News Corp announced its agreement with OpenAI in May 2024. The deal, reported by the Wall Street Journal as worth approximately $250 million over five years, covers content from across the Rupert Murdoch empire — the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Times of London, the Sun, and several Australian titles. In exchange, OpenAI gains access to current and archived journalism for training and for powering AI-generated summaries. News Corp also receives technology collaboration, meaning ChatGPT may surface attributed News Corp content in responses. The $250 million figure has not been confirmed by either party in a public filing.
The archive lives here too now.
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Axel Springer, the German publisher whose US holdings include Politico and Business Insider, signed what it described as a "long-term partnership" with OpenAI in December 2023. The financial terms were not disclosed. The agreement covers content from Springer's portfolio for use in training and in ChatGPT's browsing and summarisation features; the company stated at the time that its journalism would appear in AI responses with attribution and links back to source articles. Axel Springer was among the earliest major publishers to reach a deal rather than file a claim.
The Financial Times concluded its agreement with OpenAI in April 2024. The FT confirmed the deal publicly but did not disclose the fee. Like the Axel Springer arrangement, the FT's agreement covers licensed use of FT content in OpenAI products, with the FT stipulating that attribution and links accompany any use of its journalism in AI-generated responses. The FT has also been engaged in broader conversations about AI's effect on subscription referral traffic.
The Associated Press signed an agreement with OpenAI in July 2023, making it one of the earliest formal licensing deals in the news sector. The AP confirmed the arrangement publicly; financial terms were not released. The agreement covers access to AP's text archive — one of the most extensive in American journalism — and the AP stated the deal includes a technology partnership component. The AP's licensing framework, developed in part to standardise how its content is used by third parties, underpins the arrangement.
Nielsen's Gauge would not count this screen at all.
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Le Monde, France's newspaper of record, and Prisa, the Spanish media group whose holdings include El País, both announced agreements with OpenAI in March 2024. The two deals were announced jointly, signalling an organised approach by European publishers. Neither disclosed financial terms. The agreements cover training data use and the display of content within OpenAI products, with both publishers citing attribution as a condition. Le Monde's deal extends to its content in French; Prisa's covers Spanish-language journalism from El País and affiliated titles, giving OpenAI significant multilingual coverage.
What the deals do and do not settle
Every disclosed agreement shares a common structure: a publisher grants OpenAI a licence to use archived and current content for model training and for in-product display; OpenAI pays a fee and, in most cases, commits to attribution and linking. What none of the deals settles is the underlying legal question of whether AI companies needed a licence in the first place. The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, filed in December 2023 in the Southern District of New York, argues that training on copyrighted material without a licence constitutes infringement — a claim that, if upheld, would reframe every existing deal retroactively.
Only one fee, News Corp's, has been reported, so the disclosed figures cannot be compared directly. The reported $250 million over five years for News Corp dwarfs anything implied by the AP or Le Monde announcements, reflecting the difference in archive scale, brand reach, and, almost certainly, negotiating leverage. Publishers that signed early — the AP in mid-2023, Axel Springer in late 2023 — did so before the full scope of litigation risk had crystallised. Those that signed in 2024 bargained in a different environment, with the Times lawsuit already on the docket and the robots.txt blocking wave already under way among news sites.
