AP and OpenAI: licensing a news archive and election data
A text-archive collaboration followed by a separately announced election-results agreement.
This example helps publishers distinguish historical content from live data feeds and describe the use a license is meant to support.
Deal at a glance
- Seller / buyer
- Associated Press / OpenAI
- Original asset
- Selected text archive
- First announcement
- July 13, 2023
- Later asset
- Election vote-count results
- Later announcement
- May 27, 2026
- Economics
- Not publicly disclosed in reviewed announcements
The original archive agreement
AP announced on July 13, 2023 that OpenAI would license part of its text archive while AP gained access to OpenAI technology and product expertise. The announcement describes exploration of generative AI uses and improving OpenAI systems.
What the source does and does not establish
The initial source confirms a selected text-archive license, not a license for every AP format. It does not disclose the price, archive date range, file count, exclusivity, delivery requirements or exact division of training and other uses. It supplies no deal-specific revenue or profit figure.
Later agreement: election results
On May 27, 2026, AP announced that it would provide OpenAI with vote-count results for national, state and local races in major American cities through the 2028 general election. AP described making election information available to users of ChatGPT and OpenAI services. This separate data agreement does not reveal the economics of the 2023 archive license.
Seller lesson: define archive and feed separately
Editorial inference: a historical archive and an updating feed need different descriptions. For an archive, record date coverage, versions and correction history. For a feed, describe update frequency, identifiers and how corrections propagate. Ask a prospective buyer which product they need before building a delivery system.
Seller lesson: specify the intended use
Editorial inference: distinguish permission to train a model from permission to retrieve, display or redistribute content. Ask about attribution, freshness requirements and ongoing support. A general AI collaboration announcement may leave these boundaries unresolved; the proposed agreement should describe them.
What a smaller publisher can take away
Use this case to prepare questions, rather than an earnings benchmark. Describe your original coverage and how you track authorship, corrections and third-party material. Do not assume that a similar topic creates an open route to OpenAI or that access to technology equals cash proceeds.
Sources and verification
Primary sources reviewed October 6, 2026. Historical agreements and later developments are distinguished below.