One of the world’s biggest newspapers just changed its mind. The New York Times, long opposed to the unauthorized use of its articles by AI, has now signed its first licensing deal—with a tech company. And not just any company: Amazon.
It’s a multi-year agreement that lets Amazon use NYT content—articles, recipes, sports coverage from NYT Cooking and The Athletic—to power Alexa and, very likely, its language models too. The content will be credited, linked, and integrated into the full reading experience. But it raises a ton of questions.
Why Amazon and not OpenAI, the company NYT is currently suing? Why now, as publishers scramble to strike deals with Big Tech to stay afloat? The answer is simple: money. And the domino effect.
The New York Times was one of the last major holdouts. If even they give in, who’s left? And more importantly: what kind of future are we heading toward if news stops coming from websites or papers and starts arriving through voice assistants and generative AI?
The risk is clear—you’ll always know something, but never everything.