On March 13, 2024 OpenAI announced partnerships with the French newspaper Le Monde and the Spanish media group Prisa Media, whose titles include El Pais. The deals let ChatGPT surface and cite content from these publishers in response to user questions, with links back to the original articles, and gave OpenAI licensed content from the two organizations to support its models.
The agreements were notable for pushing OpenAI’s publisher program beyond English-language outlets into French and Spanish news, broadening both the languages and the markets covered. OpenAI presented the partnerships as a way to bring authoritative, current journalism to international users of ChatGPT while sharing value with the publishers producing it. Le Monde and Prisa framed the deals as a way to protect their journalism’s integrity and reach new audiences inside AI products.
Coming a few months after the Axel Springer and Associated Press deals, the Le Monde and Prisa partnerships showed the licensing model expanding geographically rather than remaining a US-and-Germany phenomenon. For business readers, they illustrate how quickly content licensing for AI became a global market, with non-English publishers negotiating their own terms rather than waiting for the question to be settled in courts or in English-speaking markets.