WaPo deal brings its journalism to ChatGPT

The Washington Post has signed a new partnership with OpenAI that will bring its reporting directly into ChatGPT, giving users access to summaries, quotes and links back to full articles.

The deal will see the Post’s coverage featured when users ask questions within the chatbot. Each reference to the Post’s work will include attribution and a link, encouraging users to explore deeper reporting beyond the chatbot’s responses.

Peter Elkins-Williams, Head of Global Partnerships at The Washington Post, said that the initiative was about ensuring that “impactful reporting” reaches audiences wherever they are. “We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are,” he said.

OpenAI said the agreement was part of its wider push to strengthen the quality of information surfaced by ChatGPT. “By investing in high-quality journalism by partners like The Washington Post, we’re helping ensure our users get timely, trustworthy information when they need it,” said Varun Shetty, Head of Media Partnerships at OpenAI, speaking to the Post.

More than 500 million people now use ChatGPT each week, according to OpenAI, highlighting the scale of opportunity for news publishers to reach new audiences through AI platforms.

The agreement with the Post follows a series of similar deals OpenAI has signed with news organisations around the world, covering more than 160 titles in over 20 languages.

The Washington Post has been ramping up its work with AI tools over the past year. It has developed experimental services such as Ask The Post AI and Climate Answers, and created newsroom tools like Haystacker to aid reporting. The Post has also introduced AI-generated summaries and audio versions of stories to make its journalism more accessible, while maintaining what it describes as an “LLM-agnostic” approach to technology partnerships.