OpenAI Collaborates with Politico and Axel Springer to Enhance News Content Training and Discovery

OpenAI faced challenges in November, but it is now refocusing on its role in the information ecosystem.

Today, OpenAI announced a partnership with Axel Springer, one of the world's largest media conglomerates, which owns major brands like Politico, Business Insider, BILD, and WELT.

The Berlin-based Axel Springer is collaborating with OpenAI to provide summaries of its articles and journalism content — including visuals, charts, videos, and potentially audio podcasts — for ChatGPT users. In exchange, OpenAI will gain access to valuable human-authored articles to train its AI models. These summaries will include links to the full articles and proper attribution on Axel Springer’s sites.

Users can also engage with ChatGPT to ask questions related to Axel Springer’s journalistic content.

How valuable is human-authored news to OpenAI?

According to the Financial Times, OpenAI is investing “tens of millions of euros a year” for this partnership, a significant sum for most media publishers, but likely manageable for a company with a valuation around $90 billion.

This partnership represents OpenAI's most substantial step yet in its journalism initiatives, following previous deals with the Associated Press and the American Journalism Project.

The Real-Time Advantage

OpenAI is expected to continue acquiring journalism content for training its AI models and providing timely information to users about global events.

One major criticism of ChatGPT has been its lack of real-time knowledge. In contrast, Elon Musk's xAI is developing its own large language model, Grok, which sources data from X (formerly Twitter) and has launched for X Pro subscribers this week.

By securing recent and breaking news from Axel Springer, along with access to a historical archive, OpenAI aims to provide a reliable real-time information service to compete with Grok and other news outlets.

Criticism of Licensing Practices

OpenAI’s decision to pay publishers for their content raises concerns about its treatment of smaller information sources from which it has previously scraped data without compensation or consent to train its GPT models.

As OpenAI faces copyright infringement lawsuits from individual authors and creators, this issue will likely be central to upcoming court rulings in the U.S. and internationally. Meanwhile, users on X have voiced criticisms regarding OpenAI’s perceived double standard in handling relationships with large publishers compared to individual creators.