Oxford University lets OpenAI train its AI models on Bodleian Library

Oxford University 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/AP OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian Library to populate its training set.

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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/AP OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been digitising material from Oxford’s Bodleian Library to populate its training set.
• Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP Oxford lets OpenAI train its AI models on Bodleian Library University staff voice concerns over reputational risk of partnering with company behind ChatGPT The 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 for fresh data.
• The Bodleian material digitised by OpenAI has been used to “populate the OpenAI training set”, according to internal documents.
• Oxford announced a partnership with the company in March 2025, using OpenAI software to digitise texts from the university’s world-famous library, which it said would make the content more widely available for students and researchers.
• However, the announcement did not state the material would be used for training OpenAI’s models, which are trained to recognise patterns in words – and thus “learn” to write complete sentences and perform other cognitive tasks – by being fed vast amounts of data.