What Newsrooms Should Know Before They Take Money From OpenAI

As a newsroom executive, I have long tried to resist appeals to vet donors to nonprofit journalism for their politics or even the savoriness of their business practices.

When you do that, you raise questions about whether you could fairly cover any potential donors on your banned list, and you also run the risk of offering some sort of implicit endorsement to the rest.

Both of those perceptions are antithetical to the independent stance that good journalism requires.

To take one notorious example, we never received a check from the Koch family’s interests when I was running the business side of ProPublica , but I would have been happy to take it if we had.

Nor am I one of those people who think that it makes sense to refuse corporate contributions.

Almost all major donors derive the money they are offering from a successful corporation.

With that said, I want to offer some cautionary thoughts on the largesse from the company that has become the leading corporate supporter of American journalism, OpenAI.

In gifts through its People-First AI Fund, and in large grants disbursed through the American Journalism Project and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism (both occasional consulting clients of mine), OpenAI has distributed $25 million in cash to U.S. newsrooms in the past few years, a large multiple of the journalism grants from Microsoft and Google.

OpenAI has also made a number of significant one-off gifts, so its total is considerably larger.

Anthropic has not yet joined this party. ( The Atlantic has a content-licensing agreement with OpenAI, although it does not receive grant funding from the company.) I know that the money is needed, and I am not questioning the uses to which it is currently being put.

I think newsrooms need to be more creative in the use of AI, not less; more innovative; and less afraid of the implications for particular kinds of work that may become outmoded.

Here’s what I think the recipients need to bear in mind.

The company’s motivation here is not altruistic .

OpenAI says that its intent is “to benefit all of humanity,” but we know that some people there and elsewhere worry that it is, in fact, going to end up snuffing out humanity.