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ChatGPT is fielding 1 million prompts about local news every week, OpenAI said in a blog post that also announced the AI company wants to take “a different path” on local news than other tech companies.
When a historic winter storm dumped at least a foot of snow in 19 different states last month, local news queries surged. Prompts about “weather, disasters, and school closures more than quadrupled,” OpenAI disclosed in the post.
“ChatGPT can help people find local news, provided local journalists are still out there covering it,” the post reads.
Aside from the snow- and ice-related queries, most local news prompts are about “daily civic life: community events and local businesses, crime and emergency response, and legislation, courts, and public policy,” according to OpenAI.
Even a million queries about local news reflect just a tiny fraction of overall ChatGPT usage. ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users as of October 2025, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. And previous research suggests that relatively few Americans get their news — local or otherwise — from ChatGPT. A October 2025 survey found about 10% of U.S. adults say they get news “often” (2%) or “sometimes” (7%) from AI chatbots. Nearly 75% of Americans said they never get news from chatbots.
In the same blog post noting the local news numbers, OpenAI head of economic policy Adam Cohen also addresses the “prevailing relationship between big tech firms and news organizations” and acknowledges it’s been “defined by tension” in recent years. (That’s something of an understatement. OpenAI is being sued by several news organizations, including The New York Times, The Intercept, and multiple groups of newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.)
“Partnerships were rare. Dialogue was limited,” Cohen writes. “News was a bad business model, Silicon Valley told itself, without much regard for how it affects how we understand the world around us and how trustworthy information underpins our democratic ideals.”
OpenAI says it wants to chart a different course and points to its renewed investment in Axios Local as one example of its news partnerships.
“A thriving, independent media sector isn’t just compatible with AI; it’s essential to it,” Cohen writes.
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MLA
Scire, Sarah. “ChatGPT is asked about local news 1 million times per week, OpenAI says.” Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 4 Feb. 2026. Web. 29 Apr. 2026.
APA
Scire, S. (2026, Feb. 4). ChatGPT is asked about local news 1 million times per week, OpenAI says. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved April 29, 2026, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/chatgpt-is-asked-about-local-news-1-million-times-per-week-openai-says/
Chicago
Scire, Sarah. “ChatGPT is asked about local news 1 million times per week, OpenAI says.” Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified February 4, 2026. Accessed April 29, 2026. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/chatgpt-is-asked-about-local-news-1-million-times-per-week-openai-says/.
Wikipedia
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| title = ChatGPT is asked about local news 1 million times per week, OpenAI says
| last = Scire
| first = Sarah
| work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]
| date = 4 February 2026
| accessdate = 29 April 2026
| ref = {{harvid|Scire|2026}}
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