OpenAI has entwined itself with 19 news publishers and organizations from the AP and The Atlantic to Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media to the American Journalism Project and Lenfest Institute. Now, for the first time, the company is directly funding newsrooms.

OpenAI and Axios said Wednesday that they have partnered and that OpenAI will fund four new Axios Local newsrooms, “enabled by our technology,” in Pittsburgh, Pa.; Kansas City, Mo.; Boulder, Colo.; and Huntsville, Ala. The launches will bring Axios’s total number of local newsrooms to 34.

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei has spoken bluntly in the past year about the value — and threat — that AI brings to newsrooms. “What I don’t like is the welfare-state mentality of companies begging OpenAI and Google for money,” he told New York Magazine last April. “I do think these companies, because they’re training their machine on all of our collective IP, they probably should pay us something, and I’d be happy to take that check.”

“This deal only took off when the conversation turned to juicing local news, for us but also in ways that might help others,” VandeHei told me in an email Wednesday. “We were skeptical any company would care enough to put deep thought into it — but OpenAI did. We spent six months brainstorming and came up with something exciting to us and them. It is purely additive to our Axios Local project — nothing we do depends on OpenAI but everything we do could be improved with their AI savvy.”

OpenAI is funding the four new newsrooms for three years. Axios didn’t disclose how much the company is paying; it’s a “significant” figure, VandeHei said. The Pittsburgh newsroom, with three dedicated reporters plus editing support, will launch first; jobs in the other cities are posted on Axios’s jobs board. If OpenAI stops funding after three years, Axios plans to continue those four newsrooms, VandeHei said. “It takes about three years to get near or to profitability and we will be selling ads to buyers from [the] get-go,” he said.

Axios’s own writeup of the partnership mentions that “ChatGPT will use Axios journalism to answer user queries with attributed summaries, quotes, and links to Axios stories,” while Axios can use OpenAI to build its own products. I asked VandeHei what he sees as AI’s biggest threat to news companies now. “I think any LLM advances that diminish the public’s direct access to our content [are] a theoretical threat,” VandeHei said. “It’s not one we worry much about because Axios readers are not looking for generic content or answers — they are looking for vital, fresh, trustworthy, expert info and insight.”

In addition to the four newsrooms, the announcement refers to a broader “content partnership” between Axios and OpenAI. When I asked VandeHei what such a partnership entails, he described a local news vision that goes beyond one company. “We have a dream: A super-system that would allow reporters in every town or city in America to produce a publication with no intervention beyond their reporting and writing — and then quality-control editing,” he said. “Imagine everything else done with a super-system: from visual creation and selection to social distribution to building and buying a local ad for Jim’s Pizza. We hope and believe OpenAI — and many others — can help us get there. We see this as mostly ad-driven but with events, memberships, etc., too. This is a worthy cause for others to join: Saving local news for the next generation is vital.”

OpenAi’s Wednesday announcement also flags an expansion of its existing international partnership with WAN-IFRA: “In partnership with WAN-IFRA, OpenAI is set to support 128 newsrooms across Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and South Asia. The current cohort includes over 30 newsrooms such as Norway’s Adresseavisen — one of the country’s oldest newspapers, established in 1767 — and Cambodia’s Koh Santepheap Media Group, publisher of a daily Khmer-language newspaper. The program provides hands-on education about AI implementation and culminates in participants creating AI prototypes tailored to their needs.”