On May 22, 2024 OpenAI and News Corp announced a multi-year global partnership giving OpenAI access to content from across the publisher’s stable, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, the New York Post, and the Times of London. The deal let OpenAI display News Corp content in response to user questions and use it to support its products, with reporting putting the value at roughly 250 million dollars over five years in cash and credits, which would make it among OpenAI’s largest publisher agreements.
News Corp, controlled by Rupert Murdoch and historically combative toward technology platforms over content value, framed the deal as proof that high-quality journalism has a price that AI companies should pay. OpenAI positioned it as a way to bring trusted reporting and clear attribution to ChatGPT users while compensating the journalists who produce it.
The scale of the News Corp deal marked a turning point in the publisher-licensing wave: where earlier agreements were experimental, this one signaled large, durable commercial relationships between AI labs and major media conglomerates. For business readers, it set an effective benchmark for what a flagship publisher’s archive and ongoing output might be worth as AI training and grounding data, even as other publishers like the New York Times pursued litigation instead.