Oxford lets OpenAI train its AI models on Bodleian library
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian library to populate its training set. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/APView image in fullscreenOpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian library to populate its training set. Oxford is the only UK member of the project.By June 2025, 125,000 images scanned from historical dissertations had been shared with OpenAI from the Bodleian collection, including PhD theses from European and American universities written in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- ▪OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian library to populate its training set.
- ▪Photograph: Michael Dwyer/APView image in fullscreenOpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian library to populate its training set.
- ▪Oxford is the only UK member of the project.By June 2025, 125,000 images scanned from historical dissertations had been shared with OpenAI from the Bodleian collection, including PhD theses from European and American universities written in
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/26/oxford-university-bodleian-library-open-ai-chat-gpt |
| Publication time | Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:00:36 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-26T11:16:00.422Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-26T11:16:00.422Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6Yb5gC8NmTkC · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian library to populate its training set. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/APView image in fullscreenOpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian library to populate its training set. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/APOpenAIOxford lets OpenAI train its AI models on Bodleian libraryUniversity staff voice concerns over reputational risk of partnering with company behind ChatGPTEthan Penny and Dan MilmoSat 26 Sep 2026 07.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 26 Sep 2026 07.12 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThe University of Oxford has allowed the company behind ChatGPT to train its AI models on historical texts from its Bodleian library, as tech companies scour academic institutions…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Tech.
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