FT Announces Agreement With OpenAI

The Financial Times (FT) announced it had signed a strategic agreement with OpenAI that will allow the tech firm to use its archived content to train AI models.

OpenAI will be able to use past articles and content to train its generative AI models to create text, images, and code. This will allow it to use high quality and accurate content to improve its output.

OpenAI is also permitted to provide summaries of FT articles in ChatGPT with links to the official  publication page. This will give the more than 100 million ChatGPT users worldwide access to FT content, while giving the publication access to ChatGPT’s user base.

Chief Executive John Ridding says that aside from the benefits to FT, this deal has “broader implications.”

“OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution, and compensation – all essential for us,” Ridding stated. “At the same time, it’s clearly in the interests of users that these products contain reliable sources.”

Tech firms and news agencies alike are looking for ways to protect their business in this new landscape. Ridding remains optimistic about the content licensing agreement. “We’re keen to explore the practical outcomes regarding news sources and AI through this partnership.”

So far, any details in the agreement related to compensation or financials remain confidential.

This becomes the fifth deal OpenAI has struck to ensure access to the data necessary to train its AI models in a transparent, fair, and secure way. OpenAI has deals in place with the Associated Press, LeMonde in France, Prisa Media in Spain, and Axel Springer in Germany.

OpenAI is also facing legal challenges from the New York Times, The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet, and several authors who claim copyright infringement, stating that OpenAI used their protected content to train the Large Language Models (LLMs). In some instances, they claim that ChatGPT provides outputs to prompts that contain content from their protected works verbatim.