OpenAI, UK’s Financial Times ink content licensing deal

London, April 29: The creator of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT OpenAI on Monday inked a partnership pact with UK-based Financial Times (FT) to licence its content and develop AI tools.

Under this partnership, the global news publisher will licence its material to Sam Altman-run OpenAI to help create generative AI technology that can create text, images and code indistinguishable from human creations.

"Our partnership and ongoing dialogue with the FT is about finding creative and productive ways for AI to empower news organisations and journalists, and enrich the ChatGPT experience with real-time, world-class journalism for millions of people globally," Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, said in a statement.

In addition, the FT noted that it became a customer of ChatGPT Enterprise earlier this year.

"This is an important agreement in a number of respects. It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI," said FT Group CEO John Ridding.

OpenAI has entered into multiple agreements with news organisations to licence their content for training AI models.

Axel Springer, the publisher of several media outlets including Business Insider, Politico, and the European publications Bild and Welt, has signed a similar agreement with OpenAI to extract data from its articles.

In December last year, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the tech companies used millions of articles to build ChatGPT's underlying models without proper permission.

In the lawsuit, the company said it had been in licensing discussions with Microsoft and OpenAI for months but none had resulted in a resolution.