Meta Signs Multiyear Deal to Bring Reuters News to AI Chatbot
Meta is licensing Reuters content to help its Meta AI chatbot answer questions about current events, with each response including a direct link to the source article. The multiyear deal raises questions about whether the news agency's content will also be used to train Meta's Llama models.
Meta Platforms Inc. signs a multiyear licensing agreement with Reuters to integrate the news agency's content into its Meta AI chatbot. The deal allows the AI assistant to answer user questions about news and current events by drawing directly from licensed Reuters articles. Every AI-generated response includes a direct link back to the original Reuters story, and this feature begins rolling out to users in the U.S. today.
The financial terms of the contract remain undisclosed, and it is currently unclear whether Meta will use the licensed content to train its Llama series of large language models. Rival AI providers like OpenAI have already secured similar agreements with publishers that explicitly permit the use of articles for model training. Since the quality of an AI model's responses depends heavily on the amount of training data it consumes, publisher content plays a crucial role in the competitive AI landscape.
Meta AI is available across the company's major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, as well as on Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. Until now, the chatbot primarily focuses on tasks like generating images, offering shopping suggestions, and solving math problems. As competitors increasingly integrate publisher data into their training datasets, Meta may seek similar training rights to ensure its Llama models keep pace in the rapidly evolving AI race.