I don't trust that they'll be able to make back that $40M.

This feels very much like a news agency getting into crypto or launching its own NFT line.

Or IBM selling Watson.

Or Mozilla chasing every which thing.

They're not stakeholders in the future of work. They're just wanting to stay relevant and pattern matching against what they see.

Reuters is too important for this.

If they were trying to use this as a narrative affront to OpenAI and Anthropic, maybe, but this is Reuters, not a deeply political organization seeking to land gotchas against big tech.

Reuters, the news agency, is only roughly 10% of TR's revenue. They're still a pretty big player in Legal and Tax.

I doubt the point is to "make the money back".

It's likely split between two goals:

1. Marketing and expressing to their customers that they are not falling behind, and

2. Insulating themselves from frontier labs jacking up prices, nerfing the models they depend on, or otherwise unexpected changes in behavior.

I think the main goal is #2. Thomson Reuters might be a $40B company, but.... at this point it's not clear that that holds any weight in terms of not being fucked over by 2 companies aiming for $2t+ IPO valuations.

Edit: On second thought, there is probably a #3 too. They can serve inference for their own models significantly cheaper than frontier lab rates (assuming they're capturing continuous use of their hardware). I still think #2 is the primary goal.

No it's just a value add to their existing data products and a moat against the big n LLM companies. The "news" part of the business is relatively small compared to everything else the do.

Like how Bloomberg does news but its far from their only or primary product. TR covers a different surface of data products than Bloomberg but it's a decent comparison.