On August 20, 2024 OpenAI announced a partnership with Conde Nast to display content from the publisher’s brands, including Vogue, The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Bon Appetit, within OpenAI products such as ChatGPT and the then-new SearchGPT prototype. The arrangement aimed to surface Conde Nast journalism with direct links so users could read the full stories at the source.
By this point OpenAI said it had partnered with roughly twenty media organizations, bringing its technology to well over a hundred news outlets and hundreds of content brands across more than twenty languages. The Conde Nast deal was notable for the cultural weight of its magazine titles and for landing as OpenAI was building SearchGPT, its attempt to compete with traditional web search by answering questions with cited sources.
The deal underscored how the licensing wave had spread from wire services and newspapers to lifestyle and culture publishing. There was irony in Wired joining, given that the same magazine had publicly accused the AI search company Perplexity of scraping and plagiarizing its work earlier in 2024. For a general reader, the Conde Nast partnership shows the breadth of media now feeding AI answer engines, and how the same publisher can both license to one AI firm and criticize another.