On April 29, 2024 OpenAI and the Financial Times announced a strategic partnership and content-licensing agreement. ChatGPT users would be able to see selected attributed summaries, quotes, and links from FT journalism in response to relevant questions, and OpenAI gained licensed access to FT content to help improve its models. The two organizations also said they would collaborate on developing new AI products and features for FT readers.
The FT, which had recently launched its own generative AI tools internally, presented the deal as a way to learn how AI changes news consumption while ensuring its reporting was represented accurately and with proper credit. OpenAI emphasized attribution and direct links as a way to drive readers back to publishers rather than substituting for them, a recurring theme as it accumulated news partners.
The FT deal continued the 2024 run of OpenAI publisher agreements and reinforced the emerging norm that paywalled, high-credibility business journalism would be licensed rather than simply scraped. For a general reader, it shows a respected financial newspaper choosing engagement with AI on negotiated commercial terms, betting that visibility and revenue inside AI products outweighed the risk of feeding a potential competitor.