OpenAI's Media Buying Spree: What's an AI Company Doing in the News Business?

They're also expanding into government work. The UK partnership they announced talks about "AI-driven growth" and "enhancing public services." Again, the language is all very positive. But I've seen enough enterprise software rollouts to know the gap between press release and reality can be, well, substantial.

Here's what I keep coming back to. OpenAI published a piece about how they use their own tools internally (they're calling it "Building OpenAI with OpenAI"), which is fine, every company eats its own cooking. But combined with owning media properties that will presumably write about AI, and partnering with governments that will regulate AI, and serving a million businesses that depend on AI... that's a lot of influence concentrated in one place.

I'll be honest, I don't know if this is concerning or just the natural evolution of a company that's grown faster than anyone expected. Their leadership update basically admits they're struggling to keep up with their own growth. "We remain focused on the same core," they say, while simultaneously becoming a media company, a government contractor, and an enterprise platform.

When I was running automation projects, we had a saying: if you're doing too many things at once, you're probably not doing any of them well. But maybe that's old thinking. Maybe modern tech companies really can be everything to everyone.

I'm skeptical, but I've been wrong before. Remember when everyone said collaborative robots would never work on a real factory floor? I argued against them at a trade show in 2008, quite loudly as I recall. Now they're everywhere.

So maybe OpenAI knows something I don't. They usually do. But I'd feel better about this whole media acquisition thing if someone could explain what "supporting independent media" means when you own it. That remains unclear to me, and I suspect it'll remain unclear for a while yet.

Mark Kowalski · 1 hour ago · 5 min