The New York Times (NYT), which has famously sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, has reached a content licensing deal with e-commerce and cloud juggernaut Amazon.

The NYT announced that its editorial content will appear across Amazon platforms, including its AI assistant and chatbot, Alexa+. Financial terms of the licensing deal were not disclosed.

Amazon in February 2025 had finally unveiled its long-touted AI overhaul of Alexa, which it promised will be “a smarter, more conversational, and more capable voice assistant.” But so far, Alexa+ has not really been seen much, prompting questions about its actual release date.

AI offerings

One of the most surprising revelations was that Amazon opted to make Alexa+ free for all Prime members, which potentially opens Alexa+ to a much wider audience (Amazon currently has 200 million Prime customers worldwide).

Into this mix comes the news that the New York Times has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms.

The multiyear agreement “will bring NYT editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organisation said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement also encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports.

This is the first instance of NYT agreeing to a licensing arrangement with a focus on generative AI technology.

“The deal is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for,” Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive of The Times, said in a note to staff. “It aligns with our deliberate approach to ensuring that our work is valued appropriately, whether through commercial deals or through the enforcement of our intellectual property rights.”

OpenAI, Microsoft lawsuit

It should be remembered that in December 2023 The New York Times became the first major US media organisation to sue OpenAI (and its main investor Microsoft).

Shortly after that NYT lawsuit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed his surprise at the lawsuit, saying OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models didn’t need to train on the publisher’s data.

Both Microsoft and OpenAI have sought unsuccessfully to have the case thrown out, but the New York Times lawsuit wasn’t the last copyright infringement claim to be filed against OpenAI.

In February 2024 three US online news outlets sued OpenAI, alleging the AI pioneer had used thousands of their articles to train its chatbots.

Then in May 2024 eight US newspaper publishers had alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI used millions of their articles without payment or permission.

In December 2024 a coalition of Canadian news publishers also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly using news content to train ChatGPT.

In January 2025 an Indian news publishing group filed to join legal action against OpenAI over alleged misuse of copyrighted materials to train ChatGPT models.

In March 2025 Judge Sidney Stein of New York dismissed some of the claims made by media organisations, but allowed the bulk of the case to continue, possibly to a jury trial.