NYT content Partners With Alexa+ To Power New AI Feature

In a strategic move signaling the media industry’s evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, The New York Times has signed its first AI-centric licensing agreement with Amazon.

The multi-year deal will grant Amazon access to NYT’s premium contents, including news, recipes from New York Times Cooking, and sports content from The Athletic, for use across its AI-powered ecosystem—including Alexa and its internal machine learning models.

The deal would allow Amazon to display summaries and excerpts of Times content in real time on Alexa-enabled devices, while also allowing Amazon to use the content to help train its foundation models.

The New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien stated that deals like this allow the company to give the proper respect to the individual work of their journalist through commercial deals, or through the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

New York Times Legal Battle With Microsoft And OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement

The agreement comes at a time when The New York Times is engaging in a legal battle with OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement.

The New York Times claims that both these AI companies has built their empire by stealing millions of NYT's articles without permission to train their AI models.

The suit was filed in December 2023, and it has been allowed to proceed by a U.S. federal judge and could set a significant legal precedent around AI and content rights.

District Judge Sidney Stein has denied OpenAI and Microsoft's motion to dismiss key claims, including those related to direct and contributory copyright infringement.

This highlights a broader industry concern over AI models scraping and monetizing copyrighted data without proper agreements.

Amazon’s Alexa+ Rollout

For Amazon, the deal is a major content win as it scales up Alexa+, a generative AI version of its voice assistant.

Alexa+ aims to deliver more conversational and context-aware experiences to its users. The beta version of Alexa+ has been rolled out to over 100,000 early testers this month, as

The assistant is powered in part by Anthropic’s Claude AI and represents Amazon’s push to catch up in the generative AI arms race dominated by OpenAI and Google.

While neither Amazon nor The Times disclosed financial terms or the full scope of content usage, the move sets a clear precedent: traditional media can find new monetization pathways through responsible AI partnerships—if they hold firm on licensing rights.