OpenAI inks multi-year deal with News Corp

While some major publishers are dragging OpenAI to court over copyright infringement, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire just decided to invite Sam Altman in through the front door.

News Corp and OpenAI announced a landmark multi-year global partnership. In plain English, OpenAI just secured legitimate access to an enormous treasure trove of real-time reporting and historical archives to power its AI products.

The keys to the Murdoch media vault

This is not a minor syndication deal. OpenAI is getting broad access to current and archived content across News Corp’s flagship mastheads.

That list includes heavy hitters in the US like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, Investor’s Business Daily, and the New York Post. Across the Atlantic, it covers The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun, alongside Australian powerhouses like The Australian and news.com.au.

The agreement gives OpenAI permission to display content from these publications directly inside ChatGPT responses and use it to refine its underlying models. The only carve-out is that content from News Corp’s non-news business units is excluded.

Beyond data pipelines, News Corp also agreed to share journalistic expertise with OpenAI to help guide how journalistic standards are implemented across its AI offerings. News Corp CEO Robert Thomson praised the pact as setting new standards for digital integrity, while Altman called it a proud moment for tech and journalism.

Why it matters

For regular users, this is an immediate win for reliability. Asking ChatGPT for financial analysis or breaking political developments should soon yield answers rooted in top-tier primary reporting rather than speculative web scraping or secondary aggregation.

Across the industry, OpenAI is effectively rewriting the playbook on media relations. While publishers like The New York Times pursue copyright litigation, OpenAI is aggressively cutting landmark deals with Axel Springer, the AP, and now News Corp. That strategy puts immense pressure on rivals like Google and Anthropic to either match these licensing wars or risk falling behind on fresh, authenticated content.

We think this deal is tactically brilliant for OpenAI, but it does raise an uncomfortable reality for journalism at large. When the world's most dominant AI platform signs exclusive or quasi-exclusive pacts with legacy media conglomerates, smaller and independent outlets risk being pushed entirely out of the algorithmic visibility and licensing revenue streams of the AI era.