Amazon to pay up to $25M to access New York Times content for its AI project

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) will pay around $20M to $25M in licensing fees per year to The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) to gain access to the news publisher’s content under a multiyear AI deal, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Amazon will be able to use Times’ news, cooking content, and its sports page, The Athletic, as part of the deal, the report said.

The deal will allow Amazon to use material that can be fed to train its AI models and feature summaries and short excerpts of Times content in its products and services, including Alexa, the report said.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg had reported that Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) was looking to tie up with news organizations for a new licensing project related to artificial intelligence and was planning to launch a pilot project with about 20 national news outlets for starters.

In June, The Journal reported that AI overviews and AI chatbots, especially from Google, have drastically reduced traffic to news sites, causing publications to reconsider their business model and implement more job cuts.