Financial Times enters ChatGPT content deal

The Financial Times on Monday entered into a partnership deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI that will integrate the news outlet's journalism into its chatbot.

The deal allows select attributed summaries, quotes and links from the FT's reporting to appear in ChatGPT responses to relevant queries.

"This is an important agreement ... that recognizes 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.

The partnership follows a series of recent content licensing agreements struck by OpenAI as it aims to enrich ChatGPT's knowledge base with trustworthy sources.

In the past few months, The Associated Press, Germany's Axel Springer, French daily Le Monde and Spanish conglomerate Prisa Media have also entered content deals with OpenAI.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI has been actively courting media companies as scrutiny increases around allegations of AI's violation of copyright agreements and the technology's potential for spreading misinformation

Talks toward a similar content sharing deal with the New York Times broke down, and the US news giant in December sued OpenAI in a US federal court.

The Times accused OpenAI of reproducing and repackaging portions of its exclusive reporting and articles when training the underlying language models powering ChatGPT.

OpenAI has strongly pushed back, arguing the use of publicly available data including news articles for general training purposes constitutes fair use.

The lawsuit underscores simmering legal tensions between tech companies building large language models and financially hard-hit news publishers fiercely protective of intellectual property.