Financial Times Enters into a Content Licensing Agreement with OpenAI

The Financial Times has entered into an agreement with OpenAI to license its content so that the AI startup can build new AI tools. According to a press release from FT, users of ChatGPT will see summaries, quotes, and direct links to FT articles. Any query yielding information from the FT will be clearly credited to the publication.

The FT, which is already a user of OpenAI's products, specifically the ChatGPT Enterprise, recently introduced a beta version of a generative AI search tool called "Ask FT." This feature, powered by Anthropic’s Claude LLM, enables subscribers to search for information across the publication’s articles.

“Apart from the benefits to the FT, there are broader implications for the industry. It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material,” said FT chief executive John Ridding.

“At the same time, it’s clearly in the interests of users that these products contain reliable sources,” he added. 

This marks OpenAI's fifth agreement within the past year, adding to a series of similar deals with prominent news organizations such as the US-based Associated Press, Germany’s Axel Springer, France’s Le Monde, and Spain’s Prisa Media. 

In December, The New York Times became the first major US media organization to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that these tech giants utilized millions of articles without proper licensing to develop the underlying models of ChatGPT.