The New York Times spent close to $2 billion last year producing about half a million works of journalism, chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien said in a Bloomberg Odd Lots interview published on August 10, 2026, setting that cost base directly against the compute and talent budgets of artificial intelligence companies and naming three conditions any licensing agreement would have to meet.

The interview ran for just over an hour and was recorded the day after the publisher reported second quarter results. Hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway questioned Kopit Levien on litigation, licensing, newsroom uses of machine learning, video economics, subscription pricing and acquisition policy. The conversation is one of the few occasions on which the chief executive of a large general-interest publisher has set out, in sequence and on the record, what a workable commercial arrangement with a model developer would contain.

Three tests for a licensing deal

Kopit Levien described a deal structure with three components. The first is continuity with a publisher's own commercial trajectory. A good agreement, in her formulation, is one that can be continuous with a strategy to have a sustainable and growing business for a publisher or anybody producing high quality information. The second is permission with control attached: the publisher grants clear permission to use its work and retains control over the ways that work may be used. The third is price. There has to be, she said, a sustainable and fair value exchange for the use of that work.

"And the times is very open to dealing when we can find those terms," Kopit Levien said.

The framing matters because it separates two things that publisher negotiations often conflate. Permission and control are governance questions about downstream use. Value exchange is a pricing question. A blanket corpus licence that grants unrestricted use for a flat annual sum satisfies neither of the first two tests, whatever the headline number attached to it.

She then attached a cost argument to the price test. The company spent close to $2 billion in the prior year producing half a million works of content, she said, describing stories, photographs and videos as expressive creative work that required significant resource and human beings to make. The archive behind that annual output runs to 175 years.

Against that, she set the spending of the model developers. Those companies are spending tens of billions of dollars, and in some cases hundreds of billions, on talent, on compute and on power. Her conclusion was that the same discipline should apply to inputs: they should be paying sufficient value for what they are getting from "what they call data, which is high quality, independent journalism and other kinds of creative work."

Litigation running alongside commercial talks

The publisher is pursuing both tracks at once. Kopit Levien said the company has sued three companies and has also done a deal. The suits are against OpenAI and Microsoft, filed roughly two and a half to three years ago, and against Perplexity, filed in December. The licensing agreement is with Amazon.

"There are multiple ways to take care of that problem. One is to enforce our rights in court," she said, describing the objective as standing up to the proposition that these companies took the publisher's work and built products capable of competing with it.

The discovery record in the OpenAI matter has already produced consequences that reach beyond the two parties. A federal magistrate judge ordered OpenAI to hand over 20 million anonymised ChatGPT conversation logs to news plaintiffs in November 2025, and a stay request was denied on November 13 of that year. The Perplexity action sits within a wider cluster: Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued the company in September 2025, and CNN filed a complaint in May 2026 alleging the copying of more than 17,000 works, including verbatim reproduction of paywalled text through the Comet browser assistant. Ziff Davis sued OpenAI in April 2025 over content drawn from more than 45 properties. In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in a separate authors' case, the largest publicly reported figure attached to a copyright claim in the sector.

On the Amazon agreement, the company has disclosed little. Chief financial officer Will Bardeen told analysts on the second quarter call that affiliate, licensing and other revenues combine licensing deals, affiliate income, books, television, film and commercial printing, and can move unevenly from quarter to quarter, a point made on the August 5 earnings call. That line grew 7.1 percent year over year.

What the tools are used for inside the newsroom

Kopit Levien separated the question of compensation from the question of internal deployment, and was more specific about the second.

The company runs an AI initiatives team inside the newsroom. When the Epstein files were released on a Friday night, running to roughly three million pages, that team built a toolset to search the trove for patterns and clusters against reporters' standing questions. "We were able to get to information in a much faster way," she said, adding that the approach also allowed different kinds of stories to be told.

Three further examples were given. During the transition into the second Trump administration, the tools were used to review the full public record of cabinet appointees more efficiently. In coverage of the Sydney Sweeney jeans advertising controversy, the newsroom used the technology to test the prevailing social media account of who was reacting; her description was that the team "used AI to prove that it was first a construction of the right." And to document a shift in participation sports, existing aerial imagery of tennis courts was sorted at scale to count conversions to pickleball courts.

Automated voice and translation are the accessibility applications. Kopit Levien said she listens to automated voice versions of articles while running. The company ran an early translation experiment and expects the underlying technology to improve.

Coding tools have been rolled out to a large share of product development and marketing staff. On the broader question of token spend as a planning line, she said every chief executive she knows is discussing it and that nobody has a credible answer yet.

The dividing line she set is editorial. "What's the work that should be human led?" she asked, answering that high quality independent journalism and creative work belong in that category. Reporting, in her account, is the foundation: a professional process of going into the world and unearthing new information, which then has to be translated with judgment and care. Roughly a thousand people work in digital product development at the company and about three thousand in journalism and content production. Her expectation, conditional on continued commercial success, is that the second group keeps growing.

Headcount, stars and the cost of coverage

The newsroom holds the largest collection of journalists in the company's history, with about a thousand more than when Kopit Levien joined thirteen years ago, excluding The Athletic and the Wirecutter newsroom. Departures were raised directly by the hosts, including columnist Ross Douthat's move to 60 Minutes and the exit of the Hard Fork co-hosts. Her answer was that the model rests on support structures rather than individual pay: editors, lawyers, security staff, graphics and photography, and an audience that changes what publication means.

She used cost of coverage to describe how the commercial side serves the editorial side. About 70 people were deployed in and out of Ukraine last year, five years into the war. Sending a correspondent into an Ebola zone is expensive. Her stated job is to keep the company successful enough that no editorial leader has to weigh cost against public interest.

That position was extended to advertising. On Wirecutter, the product review operation, she said the recommendation follows the testing "even if that other mattress company is the big advertiser." The claim is one that any premium publisher selling against editorial adjacency has to be able to make, and it was made without qualification.

Video, and the difference from the first attempt

Weisenthal put the earlier industry pivot to video to her directly, noting that the company's stock has sold off after each of the last two earnings reports and that video production carries cost. Kopit Levien ran the commercial business during the first pivot and characterised it plainly: "that was a cynical attempt to get ad dollars," made without regard to whether millions of people would actually engage.

Her case for the current investment is audience rather than inventory. Reading and listening audiences continue to grow, she said, and video reaches a separate population that watches news or news-adjacent entertainment on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. "This is not a replacement behavior for reading and listening," she said. The push is being staffed largely from people already at the company, with capability added later, and most podcasts have been converted into video shows.

The advertising consequence is supply. The publisher attributed its second quarter digital advertising growth partly to growth in advertising supply, and video formats are one of the mechanisms that create it.

Pricing built around a demand curve

On subscription pricing, Kopit Levien said the company never accepted a choice between wide availability for sampling and enough value in the paid product to convert. The stated strategy is "meant to get everybody under the demand curve," running from discounted international games subscriptions at one end to shared family bundles at the other.

The entry mechanic is a bundle at a dollar a week, followed by engagement, followed by a step-up to a materially higher price once value has been experienced. Digital-only average revenue per user reached $9.94 in the second quarter, up 3.1 percent year over year.

She also described a decade-long orientation away from platform distribution, saying the company has been aware for the better part of a decade that the direction of travel from the platforms meant more of the relationship had to move into its own control.

The Athletic and the acquisition bar

The Athletic was acquired with roughly 450 journalists and a small business team, many recruited from local newspapers. Integration, she said, was easier than expected. The newsroom is now about a hundred people larger, Steven Ginsburg was hired from The Washington Post about four years ago, and a substantial editing layer was added. "We've added this layer of editing and we've kept them independent," she said.

The sports operation has since been extended into new advertising environments. The Athletic gained its first connected television home in July 2026, when six of its shows were opened to sponsors on Fubo.

On further acquisitions, she did not rule anything out but set a limit: "The bar is really high for return on investment." She noted that Wordle cost considerably less than The Athletic and that the rest of the games portfolio was built internally.

Why the disclosure matters for marketers

The cost figure is the most usable output of the interview. Licensing negotiations between publishers and model developers have proceeded largely without public reference points on the supply side. A stated annual production cost of close to $2 billion for half a million works gives a per-unit figure that other publishers, and the buyers on the other side of the table, can now argue about.

The commercial context sharpens the point. Open-web publishers are recording steep referral losses: Chartbeat data showed small publishers lost 60 percent of search referral traffic over two years, and the first randomised study of AI Overviews measured a 39.8 percent reduction in outbound clicks. One independent site reported a 75 percent traffic loss as zero-click search rates climbed.

Against that backdrop the publisher reported second quarter digital advertising revenue of $114.0 million, up 20.7 percent, with total revenues of $762.5 million and 13.35 million subscribers. Peers reporting in the same window moved the other way: USA TODAY Co. recorded digital advertising down 9.2 percent and lost 22 million monthly unique visitors in a quarter, while Ziff Davis took a $54.8 million goodwill impairment against its health division. News Corp reported advertising falling to 15 percent of total revenue.

For media buyers, the addressable consequence is first-party data. The publisher's first data clean room collaboration, disclosed on June 21, 2026, reported a 61 percent increase in international click-through rate and a 25 percent performance uplift in the United States against cookie benchmarks. A logged-in base of that size is the asset that licensing negotiations and advertising sales both rest on, and Kopit Levien's three conditions describe the terms on which that asset would be rented out.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Meredith Kopit Levien, president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, interviewed by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast.

What: A disclosure that the company spent close to $2 billion in the prior year producing about half a million works of content, alongside a three-part description of acceptable artificial intelligence licensing terms, confirmation of suits against OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, an existing agreement with Amazon, and detail on newsroom applications of machine learning, video investment, subscription pricing and acquisition criteria.

When: The interview was published on August 10, 2026, and recorded the day after the company's second quarter results of August 5, 2026.

Where: The New York Times Company is headquartered in New York and operates its flagship news product alongside The Athletic, Audio, Cooking, Games and Wirecutter, with international distribution.

Why: Licensing negotiations between publishers and model developers have proceeded with almost no public cost data on the supply side, and a stated annual production cost gives buyers and sellers a reference point. The disclosure lands as open-web publishers record steep referral declines while this publisher expands advertising supply and revenue well above the market rate, making the terms on which its corpus and its logged-in audience are made available a commercial question for advertisers as well as for AI developers.