Amazon pays The New York Times $20M to $25M a year to license its journalism for AI

What was sold

Amazon licensed editorial content from The New York Times for use in its AI products. According to the Wall Street Journal, relayed by To Vima, the license covers material from the Times' news and cooking products and from The Athletic. Amazon can use it to train AI models and can feature summaries and short excerpts of Times content in its products and services, including Alexa.¹ TheWrap's report on the same news gives the same scope.²

The payment is $20 million to $25 million a year, according to people familiar with the matter, and is paid in cash.¹ The figure was reported by the Journal and not confirmed in a company filing in the sources reviewed, so it is best treated as a reported price.

How the deal came together

The deal was announced in May 2025 as a multiyear agreement, without financial terms. The Journal reported the terms on July 30, 2025.¹² It was the Times' first AI-related licensing agreement and Amazon's first such agreement with a publisher.¹²

New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said the deal "is consistent with our long-held principle that high-quality journalism is worth paying for."¹

The annual payment is nearly 1% of the Times' total 2024 revenue, according to the Journal.¹ The same article lists other publisher deals for comparison: News Corp's agreement with OpenAI could be worth more than $250 million over five years, and Axel Springer's three-year OpenAI agreement is worth at least $25 million to $30 million, per the Journal's earlier reporting.¹ Those are reported estimates and not confirmed terms.

What went wrong or drew pushback

The deal did not draw a specific objection in the sources reviewed. What stands out is the context. The Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming its content was used without consent.¹² The Amazon deal shows that the same publisher is willing to license content for AI when the terms are paid and defined.

Reporting also notes the limits of the information available. The financial terms were not disclosed by either company before the Journal's report, and the length of the term is described only as multiyear.¹ A reader cannot tell from public sources how much of the payment is for training and how much for display of summaries in Alexa and other products.

The comparison with later deals is useful. In March 2026 Meta agreed to license News Corp content in a deal reported at up to $50 million a year, which suggests that large publishers can reach higher annual figures than the Times did, though the scopes differ and both numbers are press reports.³

What it means for companies with data

For publishers and other content owners, the Amazon and Times deal is a reference for a mid-size, fixed-fee license. The payment is a meaningful sum but not a large share of a publisher's revenue, and it comes with explicit rights for the buyer to train and to display excerpts.

Three points are useful for companies with their own data. First, rights can be split by use. Training, retrieval and display are different permissions, and each can be priced and limited separately. Second, a seller can license to one party while contesting another's use, which means a license is not a general waiver. Third, the price becomes known through press reports, so sellers should assume the figure may become public.

Most companies do not own a news archive. The comparable question for a business with internal records is which uses it is willing to allow, for how long, and at what fixed or variable price. See /guides/selling-data-to-ai-companies/.