Sources: Apple discussed multiyear $50M+ deals with NBC News, Condé Nast, IAC, and other media organizations to train its generative AI systems on news articles
The company has discussed multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to train its generative A.I. systems on publishers' news articles.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple’s reported outreach fits a broader push to catch up in generative AI: earlier coverage said the company was preparing major investment to bring the technology across its products, while Apple News already gave it a longstanding relationship with publishers through its curated news service.
The talks also emerged as OpenAI was negotiating with major publishers over content terms, making high-quality news archives a contested input rather than simply material scraped from the open web.
First-order effects
Apple and the named publishers would have a formal path to negotiate multiyear rights for news material as AI training input; the reported discussions do not establish that agreements were completed.
For NBC News, Condé Nast, IAC and other publishers, the talks create a potential new licensing-revenue channel tied to archives and editorial output.
Second-order effects
Parallel negotiations by Apple and OpenAI strengthen publishers’ ability to compare terms across AI buyers, putting more emphasis on exclusivity, permitted uses, and the value of particular archives.
AI developers without comparable licensing budgets or publisher relationships may face higher costs or narrower access to premium news corpora as rights holders seek paid deals.
Third-order effects
If such agreements become routine, news content is likely to be priced as a recurring AI input, shifting publisher-AI relations from informal access toward negotiated commercial rights.
The pattern could split the market between AI systems trained on licensed, attributable sources and systems relying more heavily on broadly available data, though the durability of that divide depends on whether talks convert into deals.
The trend: Generative-AI developers are moving toward commercial licensing of high-value publisher content as they build differentiated training data and products.
> The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens. This is why I'm confident in Apple's generative AI. The sources are good, they're paying fo…
Well, as owners of a golden dataset, it makes a lot of sense from their perspective. I just wonder how this will shape the internet a few years from now on. Perhaps to the positive. As Google search is basically useless for finding a lot of good content from non-searchable soc…
Apple has officially joined the generative AI race. It's in the process of signing deals with NBC News, Conde Nast, IAC and others to license their content to train its generative AIs. The golden age of the paywall is now upon us. News sites can now double dip by both charging…
I've been wondering what Apple's game plan is for AI. It's a huge problem that LLMs are trained on hate speech and GANs are trained on CSAM. That's incompatible with how Apple does business. If this news points to how Apple intends to source their corpus for model-training, th…
NEWS: Apple is in discussions with major news and publishing organizations about licensing their content to train generative A.I. Terms are serious: At least $50 million over several years. So far, publishers are lukewarm. w/@trippmickle https://www.nytimes.com/...
Interesting and timely reporting by @BenMullin on Apple now talking to publishers, too, around using their data for training purposes (and the risks associated with any such deal) [image]
The new way content gets paid for just dropped: it's all an AI training set. The Google ‘we send you traffic in exchange for running ads against your search results’ deal, which paid for the Web for 20 years, is coming to an end. Or changing quickly. https://www.nytimes.com/... […