Amazon will pay up to $25 million to acquire content from the New York Times for AI projects

According to media reports citing informed sources, Amazon will pay approximately $20 million to $25 million annually to the New York Times for content licensing fees under a multi-year AI collaboration agreement to gain access to the news publisher's content. The report indicates that under this agreement, Amazon will be able to use news from the New York Times, cooking content, and content from its sports section, The Athletic. The agreement will allow Amazon to use these materials to train its AI models and display summaries and short excerpts of New York Times content in its products and services (including the Alexa voice assistant). Earlier this month, reports indicated that Google plans to collaborate with news organizations to launch a new AI-related content licensing project, initially piloting with about 20 national news media outlets. It is reported that AI summarization features and AI chatbots (especially products from Google) have significantly reduced traffic to news websites, forcing many publishers to reconsider their business models and implement more layoffs