With the stated goal of making “high-quality news more accessible,” The Washington Post and OpenAI have announced a partnership centered on ChatGPT.

The strategic deal will see OpenAI interface ChatGPT respond to user queries by displaying summaries, quotes and links to original reporting from the Post.

News of Tuesday’s agreement comes at an unsettled time for many industries as AI makes inroads, with the media business particularly sensitive to the downside risks. A divide has opened up across the industry, with some publishers and news organizations opting to forge alliances with AI companies in order to secure revenue and a measure of security, but others taking legal action at what they perceive as an existential threat. The New York Times Co. sued OpenAI earlier this year, and last month a judge ruled the copyright infringement claim can proceed.

The Post, which has been owned by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos for more than a decade, has hit a rocky period of late. It lost a large chunk of its subscriber base after Bezos announced shortly before last November’s election that the Post would not make an endorsement in the presidential race. In addition to that break from longtime precedent, Bezos also re-oriented the outlet’s op-ed operation. He issued a directive that the opinion section would advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not run any pieces deemed to oppose those principles.

Far beyond the news business, Amazon is among a handful of tech behemoths pledging to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI over the coming years. Microsoft, one of those top-tier players, has also invested $13 billion in OpenAI, helping ChatGPT gain scale in recent years.

The partnership “reflects a shared commitment to making reliable, factual information easier to find and engage with,” a press release said. That is especially true, it added, with “complex or fast-moving topics, where timely, well-sourced reporting, like that of The Post, matters most.” Plans call for “clear attribution and direct links to full articles,” enabling readers to gain additional background and context.

The notion of links, long the lifeblood of the internet, being marginalized by the march toward an AI-dominated future has raised alarms at many news organizations given major changes by Google to its search algorithm. As one of the contestants in the AI arms race, Google is leveraging its nearly 90% market share in search to promote search results from its AI platform Gemini. The objective is to retain traffic within Google rather than linking out to posts from external sites.

“We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are,” said Peter Elkins-Williams, Head of Global Partnerships at The Washington Post. “Ensuring ChatGPT users have our impactful reporting at their fingertips builds on our commitment to provide access where, how and when our audiences want it.”

Varun Shetty, Head of Media Partnerships at OpenAI, said more than 500 million users each week use ChatGPT, giving it important reach for news outlets. “By investing in high-quality journalism by partners like The Washington Post, we’re helping ensure our users get timely, trustworthy information when they need it,” he said.

The Post deal follows 20 similar deals between OpenAI and news publishers, spanning 160 outlets and more than 20 languages.