• by Ray Schultz , December 13, 2023

OpenAI is going to pay German publisher Axel Springer for using its content to train AI models.

In addition to training, the content will be used for creating answers in ChatGPT.

The multi-year deal will result in substantial revenue for Axel Springer, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

As part of the arrangement, users will receive content from Axel Springer products. These include Politico and Business Insider, as well as German brands such as Bild. 

The Axel Springer content will be available early in 2024.

Reports state that Axel Springer has made a multi-billion investment in OpenAI.

"We want to explore the opportunities of AI empowered journalism – to bring quality, societal relevance and the business model of journalism to the next level," says Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer.

Axel Springer has been edging ever closer to deploying AI. Last week, the firm announced it that it is downsizing its Upday news brand and will relaunch it next year as a service driven exclusively by artificial intelligence, resulting in some layoffs. 

As part of this plan, Axel Springer is ending its cooperation with Samsung, eliminating Upday for Samsung, a news service for Samsung devices, effective at the end of the year, the company announced on Friday.  

In June of this year,, the news broke that Axel Springer’s Bild, Europe’s largest tabloid, will “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes”, the company said in an email to staff, according to The Guardian reported in June.