OpenAI Signs Content Deal With Italian Publisher GEDI

OpenAI and Italian media group GEDI have announced a strategic partnership that will bring Italian-language content from GEDI's news outlets, including La Repubblica and La Stampa, directly to ChatGPT users.

The deal, announced today and originally shared by GEDI, will give ChatGPT users access to attributed quotes, content, and links to GEDI's publications. OpenAI says the collaboration will incorporate GEDI's journalism to improve the relevance and accuracy of its products — including ChatGPT and the SearchGPT prototype — for users in Italy.

GEDI is one of Italy's largest media groups, and the agreement covers its portfolio of news outlets. Beyond content licensing, the partnership opens opportunities for the two organizations to collaborate on AI features and applications that change how readers in Italy access and interact with news.

What the executives said

John Elkann, Chairman of GEDI, framed the deal as part of a broader corporate shift. "The partnership signed with OpenAI is part of GEDI's digital transformation journey and recognizes its leadership in producing high-quality content within the Italian media landscape," Elkann said. "From today, ChatGPT users will be able to rely on articles and in-depth analyses from our publications to obtain top quality information on a wide range of topics, with a special focus on the Italian context."

Elkann also pointed to a distribution benefit for the publisher. "This agreement also allows GEDI to reach a broader international audience, thanks to the advanced translation capabilities developed by ChatGPT," he said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman positioned the deal within the company's global publisher strategy. "It's important we work with publishers around the world so everyone can have access to accurate, reliable information in their own language," Altman said. "This partnership acknowledges GEDI's high-quality journalism and enhances the ChatGPT experience for millions of people in Italy and around the world."

Why it matters

The deal continues OpenAI's run of licensing agreements with news organizations, a strategy that serves two purposes: it supplies training and retrieval content for the company's models, and it helps OpenAI manage legal and reputational pressure from publishers over the use of their work. Attributed links in ChatGPT also give publishers referral traffic as AI assistants absorb more of the queries that once went to search engines.

For Italian media, the stakes are equally concrete. Publishers across Europe have pressed regulators and courts over AI training practices, and GEDI's choice to license rather than litigate signals how major non-Anglophone media groups are resolving that tension. The emphasis on Italian-language accuracy also matters: large language models have historically performed less reliably in languages outside English, and deals like this one are how OpenAI aims to close that gap for national markets.

The partnership additionally covers joint work on AI features for news reading and interaction, which could shape how GEDI's audience encounters journalism on the publisher's own platforms in the future.