US tech titan Microsoft has inked the first deal of its kind in Australia, paying a media company to access news articles that will inform its Copilot artificial intelligence platform, in a multimillion-dollar boost for local journalism.
Microsoft, which has a market capitalisation of $US2.85 trillion ($4.1 trillion), has agreed a one-year pilot deal with Australian media group Nine Entertainment to reference content from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, Brisbane Times and WA Today.
The agreement allows Microsoft’s Copilot, the AI digital assistant integrated into Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, to reference the text of news articles published by Nine’s mastheads during AI searches to contextualise and keep answers up to date.
Copilot, the two companies said in a statement, will display snippets, headlines and summaries that will direct readers to the mastheads for the complete stories. Users will need a subscription to read the full story.
Neither side would say how much the deal was worth. Nine confirmed it would not lodge a statement with the Australian Securities Exchange, suggesting the value of the agreement was not considered material to the business (typically about 5 per cent of earnings, or under $25 million a year in Nine’s case). Nine also owns the free-to-air Nine Network, streaming platform Stan and outdoor advertising firm QMS Media.
Jane Livesey, president of Microsoft in Australia and New Zealand, said it was critical for tech companies to work with publishers to build trust in AI platforms.
“AI is transforming the way Australians connect with information, and access to trustworthy sources has never mattered more,” she said.
“Forward-thinking partnerships like this show how technology and media companies can work together to ensure a thriving future for Australian journalism.”
Nine chief executive Matt Stanton said he was delighted to have secured a partnership with Microsoft. “As AI continues to evolve, the role of verified, premium journalism in grounding these outputs is essential,” he said.
“This collaboration is a win-win, delivering for users of AI while respecting copyright and protecting the long-term value of our intellectual property.”
Tory Maguire, the managing director of publishing at Nine, said Microsoft had been a proactive player in this, which was its first AI deal with a media company in the Asia-Pacific region.
“This continues to unlock new revenue opportunities for our mastheads as the media ecosystem continues to evolve, supporting local and trusted Australian journalism,” she said.
The rapid rise of generative AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini has prompted lawsuits and commercial deals from media companies, whose content may have been scraped to train or inform these models.
It also creates an opportunity for trusted news outlets. Stanton has previously said Nine has licensed its content to two unnamed Australian firms to improve their in-house large language models, but he has been angling for bigger tech firms to come knocking.
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has described its news operations – it owns The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, The Times of London, The Australian and the Daily Telegraph – as “essentially an input company” for AI platforms. It has signed commercial deals with OpenAI and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, but is suing Perplexity AI for a “massive amount of illegal copying”.
The New York Times, meanwhile, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft as well as Perplexity in two lawsuits alleging these firms unlawfully scraped millions of its articles.
Separate to these AI deals and lawsuits, the Albanese government is attempting to pass legislation forcing Google, Meta and TikTok to strike commercial deals with Australian media companies in return for hosting their news articles. The News Bargaining Incentive is meant to strongarm those three tech giants into paying upwards of $200 million a year to Australian publishers.
The government says it wants to pass the law in the coming months.
Source: https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/microsoft-strikes-its-first-australian-ai-media-deal-to-boost-copilot-20260702-p60c2s