News ChatGPT Plugins
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News ChatGPT plugins were a category of third-party tools that connected ChatGPT to live news feeds, breaking headlines, regional outlets, and topic-specific aggregators between March 2023 and April 2024. They covered global wires, single-country publications, business news, technology trackers, and tailored digests. Most reached the public during the broad rollout that began on May 12, 2023 and disappeared along with the rest of the plugin store on April 9, 2024, when OpenAI shut the platform down in favor of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.[1][2]
This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable. Some developers later released equivalent tools as Custom GPTs, and the larger publishers folded their content into wider licensing deals with OpenAI.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023, with twelve external partners (Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier) plus a first-party browsing plugin and a code interpreter.[1][3] None of the launch slate was a dedicated news tool. Browsing covered some of the same ground by letting the large language model follow links to current articles, but it could not deliver structured headline lists, country filters, or topic queries that became the shape of the news category once independent developers and publishers arrived.
The news category took shape in the weeks after OpenAI opened the plugin store to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers on May 12, 2023.[4] Penrose Analyst, written by future OpenAI staffer Will Depue, blended news search with academic research and went live on May 22, 2023.[5] Independent plugins such as BizToc, World News, AI News Roundup, UK Latest News, Italy Latest News, and TechPulse appeared in directories from June 20, 2023 onwards.[6][7][8][9][10][11] German publisher Axel Springer entered with Welt NewsVerse and the global aggregator NewsPilot landed on June 26, 2023.[12][13][14] BILD News followed on July 7, MixerBox News on July 21, Quick News Digest on August 11, and a general-purpose News plugin built around the gpt-news.co aggregator on October 27, 2023.[15][16][17][18]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces ChatGPT plugins; no news plugin in the launch slate[1][3] |
| May 12, 2023 | Plugin store opens broadly to ChatGPT Plus subscribers[4] |
| May 22, 2023 | Penrose Analyst goes live with news and arXiv search[5] |
| June 20, 2023 | BizToc, AI News Roundup, World News, UK Latest News, Italy Latest News, TechPulse appear in directories[6][7][8][9][10][11] |
| June 26, 2023 | NewsPilot and Welt NewsVerse added; Welt is the first German news brand[12][13][14] |
| July 7, 2023 | BILD News added by Axel Springer[15] |
| July 13, 2023 | OpenAI signs two-year content deal with Associated Press, separate from the plugin program[19] |
| July 21, 2023 | MixerBox News joins the store[16] |
| August 11, 2023 | Quick News Digest joins[17] |
| October 27, 2023 | News plugin from gpt-news.co joins[18] |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces GPTs[20] |
| December 13, 2023 | OpenAI and Axel Springer announce a global content partnership covering Welt, BILD, Politico, and Business Insider, with attribution inside ChatGPT replies[21] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens[22] |
| March 19, 2024 | Plugin store closes; new plugin chats end[2] |
| April 9, 2024 | Remaining plugin conversations end and the platform fully shuts down[2] |
The news category was always informal. OpenAI did not publish a fixed taxonomy during the plugin era; third-party directories sorted plugins by tag, so the same tool sometimes appeared under News, Aggregator, Search, or a country tag.[23] For a broader map of the plugin platform, see chatgpt plugin categories.
The large language model behind ChatGPT in 2023 (initially GPT-3.5, then GPT-4 for paid users) had three weaknesses for news work. Its training data ended in 2021, its open browsing was slow and rate-limited, and it could not filter results by country, source, or publication time. News plugins addressed those gaps by reaching out at query time to a publisher feed, an aggregator API, or a wire service. Typical capabilities included topic search across global feeds, country filters keyed to BBC, Sky News, or local outlets, source filters for individual publishers, top headlines by region, business and finance news, Hacker News tracking, AI-industry roundups, and personalised digests. A response normally returned the article title, a brief summary, the publication date, the source name, and a link back to the publisher.
A single ChatGPT session could load up to three plugins at once. That limit shaped how readers chose tools: a user following a single story might pair Welt NewsVerse with BizToc and a translation plugin, a technology reader might run TechPulse alongside AI News Roundup and Penrose Analyst, and a general newshound might combine NewsPilot, World News, and Quick News Digest. These habits pushed readers into deliberate prompt engineering with explicit instructions to cite sources, refuse if no source was found, and surface plugin errors rather than guess.
The table below lists plugins for which launch information can be confirmed in at least two independent sources. Tools that could not be verified are omitted.
| Plugin | Function | Developer | Verified period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Penrose Analyst | News search across the past five years plus arXiv research papers | Will Depue / Aperiodic | Live from May 22, 2023[5] |
| BizToc | Search of BizToc business and finance news content | BizToc | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[6] |
| AI News Roundup | Daily clickable roundup of artificial-intelligence headlines | Independent | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[7] |
| World News | Topic search and summaries from global wire feeds | Simon Bissonnette (simbiss.net) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[8] |
| UK Latest News | Headlines from BBC News, Sky News, The Independent and other UK outlets | Ross Heat (gptnews.uk) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[9] |
| Italy Latest News | Headlines and topic search for Italian news | articoli-alternativi-gratis.it | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[10] |
| TechPulse | Top, new, ask, show, and job stories from Hacker News | aigenprompt.com | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[11] |
| NewsPilot | Real-time news from 15,000 sources, filterable by country and category | Apex News | Joined June 26, 2023[12] |
| Welt NewsVerse | Latest text teasers from welt.de filterable by topic and premium status | Axel Springer / Welt | Joined June 26, 2023[13][14] |
| BILD News | Topic and keyword search of bild.de articles, full-text reading, save-for-later | Axel Springer / BILD | Joined July 7, 2023[15] |
| MixerBox News | Headlines across business, finance, politics, sports, technology, lifestyle, and world tags | MixerBox | Joined July 21, 2023[16] |
| Quick News Digest | Personalised global news digest based on user interests | Independent | Joined August 11, 2023[17] |
| News (gpt-news.co) | Aggregator of 80,000 sources with topic search, country headlines, and source filters | gpt-news.co | Joined October 27, 2023[18] |
Penrose Analyst was created by Will Depue, who later joined OpenAI's research staff. Its news mode could search any article from the previous five years and return current top headlines with no paywall, while its research mode searched arXiv preprints and could summarise or explain any arXiv link through embeddings.[5] Penrose Analyst was unusual because it surfaced full article text inside the chat rather than asking the user to follow a link, and its multi-year search window distinguished it from wire-style plugins.
BizToc, an independent business and finance aggregator, exposed a single getNews command that returned articles matching a search term, drawn from its own crawl of business outlets.[6] Coverage skewed toward equity markets, mergers, earnings, and macroeconomic stories. BizToc required no user account and was free, which made it a common companion to plugins from the finance plugins category. AI News Roundup advertised itself in one line: "Get today's AI news headlines as a clickable link roundup."[7] Its single getHeadline command took no arguments and returned the day's stories as a list of titles linked back to the source.
World News was written by Canadian developer Simon Bissonnette and operated through simbiss.net.[8] Its getNews command accepted a search term and returned articles with title, description, source, URL, image, and date. An optional language parameter let the plugin translate the response into the user's preferred language, which distinguished it from English-only aggregators.
UK Latest News, hosted at gptnews.uk, fetched headlines from BBC News, Sky News, The Independent, and other British outlets, with filters for business, politics, and sports.[9] Its source code was published on GitHub by Ross Heat as a Next.js application; this transparency made it a teaching example in the early plugin community. Italy Latest News, run from articoli-alternativi-gratis.it, did the same job for Italian readers and proved relevant after ChatGPT spent a month blocked in Italy by the country's data-protection authority before resuming service in late April 2023.[10]
TechPulse fetched top, new, ask, show, and job stories from Hacker News, producing compact lists of links and short summaries.[11] Several independent developers built similar Hacker News bridges in May and June 2023; TechPulse, hosted at techpulse.aigenprompt.com, was the version that reached the official store. NewsPilot was the largest aggregator-style plugin by raw source count: its developer, the Apex News brand with a contact at opera.com, claimed 15,000 global sources with real-time updates.[12] Two endpoints did the work, getNews for category headlines and getSearchNews for topic search.
Welt NewsVerse was the first ChatGPT plugin from a German news brand and from a major European publisher.[13][14] It exposed welt.de teasers across politics, business, entertainment, and breaking-news beats, with a filter that separated premium articles from the free tier. Michael Reiner, head of Welt Digital, framed the launch as a way to bring quality journalism into conversational interfaces rather than ceding reader attention to summarisers that did not credit publishers. The German press flagged risks: a fake plugin briefly impersonating Welt appeared in the store before being removed.[24] BILD News followed less than two weeks later, anchoring Axel Springer's second title in the same store.[15] The BILD plugin offered topic and keyword search, retrieval of full article text via URL, and save-for-later. Both plugins were precursors to the broader OpenAI deal that would absorb their function later in the year.
MixerBox News came from the largest single developer in the plugin store. MixerBox shipped dozens of consumer-facing plugins, and its news entry covered business, finance, economics, politics, society, entertainment, sports, lifestyle, technology, local, world, and military stories with each result carrying a publication date and a link.[16] Quick News Digest joined in August 2023 with a tailored approach: it asked the reader to declare interests and curated a digest from world news against those interests.[17] The News plugin from gpt-news.co was the last major arrival, joining October 27, 2023, with access to 80,000 sources and three functions: TopicSearch, TopCountryHeadlines by country code, and SearchBySource for a named outlet such as BBC News.[18]
The news plugin category overlapped with a parallel strand of business activity at OpenAI. On July 13, 2023, OpenAI signed a two-year deal with the Associated Press to license parts of the AP archive back to 1985 in exchange for technology access; that deal was about training data and did not produce an AP plugin.[19] On December 13, 2023, OpenAI and Axel Springer announced a global partnership in which ChatGPT would surface summaries of content from Welt, BILD, Politico, and Business Insider, with attribution and clickable links inside replies.[21] This was the first time OpenAI committed publicly to attribution inside ChatGPT answers, and it effectively superseded the company's own plugins. Both Welt and BILD plugins stayed in the store until the April 2024 shutdown.
The broader media-literacy debate around generative-AI summaries also shaped the category. Reviewers pointed out that a one-line summary could strip context, that translation features could obscure source-language nuance, and that aggregator plugins relying on third-party APIs had no editorial control over which outlets surfaced for any given query.
OpenAI gave roughly three weeks of notice between the March 19, 2024 freeze on new conversations and the April 9, 2024 shutdown.[2] Discovery had been poor: the store was a flat list with limited search and no ratings. The three-plugins-per-chat limit forced choices between, for example, a country plugin and a global wire. Plugins required developers to host an external server and an OpenAPI manifest, while GPTs allowed lighter no-code authoring and still permitted Actions for full external integrations. Direct partnerships such as the Axel Springer deal also gave OpenAI a way to surface news inside ChatGPT without depending on third-party developers.[21]
News-plugin functionality moved to three kinds of successor. After the GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024, several developers rebuilt their tools as Custom GPTs: NewsPilot reappeared as a News Pilot AI GPT, BizToc shipped a BizToc Official GPT, and a long tail of independent newsroom GPTs filled the niche. Native ChatGPT browsing matured through 2023 and 2024, and OpenAI added direct attribution under publisher deals so ChatGPT could answer news questions without a separate plugin. Publisher partnerships such as Axel Springer became the first wave of in-product attributed news content.
The news category overlapped with two adjacent groupings. The media chatgpt plugins category shared MixerBox News and AI News Roundup when directories tagged them under media. Penrose Analyst sat in both academic research and news because of its dual arXiv plus news search. Country-tagged plugins such as UK Latest News, Italy Latest News, and Welt NewsVerse straddled the news category and a country listing.