The Financial Times and OpenAI have announced a strategic partnership and licensing agreement that will integrate the newspaper’s journalism into ChatGPT and collaborate on developing new AI products for FT readers. However, just because OpenAI is cozying up to publishers doesn’t mean it’s not still scraping information from the web without permission.

Through the deal, ChatGPT users will be able to see selected attributed summaries, quotes, and rich links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries. Additionally, the FT became a customer of ChatGPT Enterprise earlier this year, providing access for all employees to familiarise themselves with the technology and benefit from its potential productivity gains.

“This is an important agreement in a number of respects,” said John Ridding, FT Group CEO. “It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI.”

In 2023, technology companies faced numerous lawsuits and widespread criticism for allegedly using copyrighted material from artists and publishers to train their AI models without proper authorisation.

OpenAI, in particular, drew significant backlash for training its GPT models on data obtained from the internet without obtaining consent from the respective content