The AP signs a two-year deal with OpenAI, under which the AP will get access to OpenAI tech and license some of its archive dating back to 1985 for AI training
The Associated Press on Thursday said it reached a two-year deal with OpenAI, the parent company to ChatGPT, to share access to select news content and technology.
Context & Ripple Effects
The AP's two-year OpenAI deal is the template-setter for a wave that followed fast: within days OpenAI struck a $5M content-and-credits partnership with the American Journalism Project, and by December Axel Springer had signed a multiyear agreement putting Politico and Business Insider into ChatGPT training data. The AP was the first domino — a nonprofit wire service trading archive access for technology access rather than cash.
First-order effects
- The AP gains hands-on access to OpenAI's models while its post-1985 text archive becomes licensed training material, converting a dormant asset into recurring value without litigation risk.
- OpenAI secures its first marquee news license, giving ChatGPT a defensible answer to the 'stolen content' critique just as publisher lawsuits were looming.
Second-order effects
- Publishers watching the terms — Gannett, News Corp, and IAC were already in pricing talks per later reporting — now have a benchmark to negotiate against, shifting leverage from courts to contracts.
- Rival model builders must either match OpenAI's licensing deals or train on unlicensed news and absorb the legal and reputational exposure OpenAI just priced around.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Axel Springer, then the FT signing similar deals — news archives consolidate into a licensed training market where a handful of large rights-holders monetize back catalogs while smaller outlets without archives get left out of the revenue pool.
- The deal structure points toward attribution-by-contract replacing fair-use-by-litigation as the industry norm for AI training data, with wire services and legacy publishers as the gatekeepers.
The trend: News publishers are moving from resisting AI training to licensing their archives for it, with OpenAI's string of deals — AP, American Journalism Project, Axel Springer, FT — establishing the market's first price and terms benchmarks.