Google signs deal with Associated Press for Gemini news content

16 Jan 2025

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Neither party has disclosed how much Google will pay The Associated Press for its news content.

News publisher The Associated Press (AP) will deliver content to Google’s Gemini, the two companies announced in a new deal that seeks to make Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot respond to queries with up-to-date results.

In its announcement yesterday (15 January), Google’s VP of global news partnership Jaffer Zaidi said that the deal between the two will see AP delivering “a feed of real-time information” to “enhance” the results displayed in the Gemini app.

AP has collaborated with Google for years, providing Google Search with news, however, the new partnership is Google’s “first such deal”, AP said.

AP’s chief revenue officer Kristin Heitmann commented on the announcement, saying: “We are pleased Google recognises the value of AP’s journalism as well as our commitment to nonpartisan reporting, in the development of its generative AI products.” However, neither company has confirmed how much Google will be paying AP for its news.

Similar to its deal with Google, in 2023, AP signed a deal with OpenAI to allow the ChatGPT-maker to train its AI systems on AP’s archive of news stories. OpenAI has also made a deal with NewsCorp, which includes The Wall Street Journal and The Times among its offerings, to access news content for ChatGPT.

Gemini – previously called Bard – is Google’s interactive generative AI offering trained on multimodal data, compiling information and presenting it to users who search queries on the chatbot.

While AI companies have officially collaborated with some news organisations to use their content to train AI models, in many instances, it seems to not be the case – with a number of news publishers currently being engaged in ongoing legal battles with tech companies over their alleged unauthorised usage of published news material protected under copyright.

In 2024, the French competition watchdog fined Google €250m under EU intellectual property laws after complaints from major news publishers that the company used content from their websites to train Gemini.

While in 2023, the New York Times launched a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over ChatGPT’s alleged copyright infringement of “millions” of articles published by the company.

Meanwhile, today (16 January), in a similar deal, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Mistral AI – a Paris-based AI company with its own chatbot Le Chat – announced a multiyear collaboration which will give the company access to AFP’s news. The new deal will see Mistral AI utilising AFP’s more than 2,000 daily text stories in six languages to train its AI chatbot.

“Partnering with a globally trusted news agency like AFP allows Le Chat to offer reliable, factual and up-to-date responses, verified by professional journalists. We believe improving the accuracy of these responses is a key step in the deployment of our technology, particularly for businesses,” said Arthur Mensch, the CEO and co-founder of Mistral AI.

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Suhasini Srinivasaragavan is a sci-tech reporter for Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com