On December 13, 2023 OpenAI announced a partnership with the German media group Axel Springer, the first deal of its kind to bring a major publisher’s journalism directly into ChatGPT. Under the agreement, ChatGPT could provide summaries of selected news content from Axel Springer’s titles, including Politico, Business Insider, and the German outlets Bild and Welt, with attribution and links back to the full articles.
The arrangement also gave OpenAI access to Axel Springer content to help train its models, and gave the publisher a revenue stream and a foothold in AI-assisted news distribution. OpenAI framed it as a way to support quality journalism and offer users more current, sourced answers, while Axel Springer treated it as an experiment in how AI might create new value for news organizations.
This deal opened what became a steady stream of publisher-licensing agreements through 2024, as OpenAI signed the Associated Press, News Corp, the Financial Times, Conde Nast, and others. It arrived in the same period as the New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, framing two opposing publisher strategies: license and partner, or litigate. For business readers, the Axel Springer deal marked the start of a formal market for news content as training and grounding data for AI systems.