OpenAI announces content deal with Hearst, including content from Cosmopolitan, Esquire and the San Francisco Chronicle

Published

1 year ago

October 8, 2024

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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

OpenAI announced a partnership with Hearst, the media conglomerate behind outlets like the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Elle and others.

Under the partnership, OpenAI’s products, such as ChatGPT and SearchGPT, will be able to display content from more than 20 magazine brands and more than 40 newspapers, the company’s announced on Tuesday.

“Our partnership with OpenAI will help us evolve the future of magazine content,” Hearst Magazines President Debi Chirichella said in a statement.

As part of the agreement, Hearst content in ChatGPT will include appropriate citations and link users to the original Hearst sources, the media company said in the announcement. Heart’s non-magazine and newspaper businesses will not be included in the partnership.

The deal is the latest in a recent trend of media outlets entering into content partnerships with AI startups.

OpenAI announced a similar partnership in August with Condé Nast, which owns media brands such as Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair and Wired.

Perplexity AI debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers in July following more than a month of plagiarism accusations. Media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com were the first to join Perplexity AI’s “Publishers Program.”

OpenAI and Time announced a “multi-year content deal” in June that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of the magazine’s history. OpenAI will be able to display Time’s content within its ChatGPT chatbot in response to user questions, according to the magazine, and use Time’s content “to enhance its products,” or, likely, to train its AI models.

In May, OpenAI announced a partnership with News Corp., allowing OpenAI to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post and other publications. Reddit also announced a deal with OpenAI in May to allow the ChatGPT maker to train its AI models on the social media company’s content.

Other news publications and media outlets are aggressively trying to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent.

The Center for Investigative Reporting, the country’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and its lead backer Microsoft in federal court in June for alleged copyright infringement, following similar suits from publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.

The New York Times in December filed a suit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging intellectual property violations related to its journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The newspaper said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’s uniquely valuable works,” according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. OpenAI disagreed with the publication’s characterization of events.

WATCH: OpenAI COO breaks down Apple partnership, new AI models

Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

14 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: