News ChatGPT Plugins

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. At least thirteen news-focused plugins can be verified by independent sources, ranging from global wires and single-country publications to business trackers, technology feeds, and personalised digests. None shipped in the original launch slate of twelve partners on March 23, 2023; most reached the public during the broad rollout that began on May 12, 2023, and all of them 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This article serves as a historical reference.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.^[21]

What were news ChatGPT plugins?

News ChatGPT plugins were OpenAPI-defined connectors that let ChatGPT query a publisher feed, an aggregator API, or a wire service at the moment a user asked a question, then return structured results (headline, summary, date, source, and a link) inside the chat. They existed because the large language model behind ChatGPT had no live access to current events: its training data was frozen (initially to 2021) and its native browsing was slow and could not filter by country, source, or publication time. A news plugin closed that gap by acting as a real-time bridge to journalism. The category was never an official OpenAI taxonomy; it was an informal grouping applied by third-party directories, so the same tool sometimes appeared under News, Aggregator, Search, or a country tag.^[23]

How did ChatGPT plugins start and end?

OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023, describing them as "tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle" that "help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services."^[1] The launch shipped 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 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]}

The era was short. OpenAI introduced Custom GPTs at its first DevDay on November 6, 2023, opened the GPT Store on January 10, 2024 (users had already built over three million custom GPTs by then), froze new plugin conversations on March 19, 2024, and fully shut the platform down on April 9, 2024.^[2][20][22]

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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.

What did news plugins do?

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.

Which plugins gave the news?

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.

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Penrose Analyst

Penrose Analyst was created by Will Depue, who later joined OpenAI's research staff. Announcing it on May 22, 2023, Depue wrote that the plugin could "Search any news article in the last 5 years" and "Get the latest top news headlines, no paywall," while also searching "all research papers on the Arxiv" and summarising any arXiv link via 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 and AI News Roundup

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

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 and Italy Latest News

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 and NewsPilot

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 and BILD News

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, Quick News Digest, and gpt-news.co

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]

How did OpenAI's publisher deals change the news plugins?

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, reported as the first of its kind, in which ChatGPT would surface summaries of content from Welt, BILD, Politico, and Business Insider (including otherwise paywalled stories), with attribution and clickable links inside replies.^[21] OpenAI agreed to pay Axel Springer tens of millions of euros for the rights.^[21] OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said the deal would "help provide people with new ways to access quality, real-time news content through our AI tools," adding that the company was "deeply committed to working with publishers and creators around the world."^[21] This was the first time OpenAI committed publicly to attribution inside ChatGPT answers, and it effectively superseded the company's own plugins. Both the 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.

Why were ChatGPT plugins deprecated?

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]

What replaced ChatGPT plugins?

News-plugin functionality moved to three kinds of successor. After the GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024 (with over three million custom GPTs already built since the November DevDay announcement), 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.^[22] 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.^[21]

How did news plugins relate to media and other categories?

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.

ELI5

Imagine ChatGPT in 2023 as a very smart friend who had been asleep since 2021 and so did not know any recent news. Plugins were like little phones you could hand that friend so they could call a newspaper and ask, "What happened today?" Some phones called British papers, some called German papers, and some called a giant switchboard that knew tens of thousands of news sites. You could only hand your friend three phones at a time. In 2024 OpenAI took all the phones away and instead taught ChatGPT to read the news directly, with little name tags so you could see where each story came from.

See also

• ChatGPT
• ChatGPT Plugins
• ChatGPT Plugin Categories
• Custom GPTs
• GPT Store
• OpenAI
• GPT-4
• Large Language Model
• Prompt Engineering
• Media ChatGPT Plugins
• Academic Research ChatGPT Plugins
• News

References

1. OpenAI. "ChatGPT plugins." March 23, 2023. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/ ↩
2. OpenAI Developer Community. "Plugin Store and New Chats With Plugins Closed March 19 2024." 2024. https://community.openai.com/t/plugin-store-and-new-chats-with-plugins-closed-march-19-2024/689877 ↩
3. TechCrunch. "OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet." March 23, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/23/openai-connects-chatgpt-to-the-internet/ ↩
4. Search Engine Journal. "OpenAI Introduces Plugin Support For ChatGPT." 2023. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/openai-introduces-plugin-support-for-chatgpt/483053/ ↩
5. Depue, W. (@willdepue). "Penrose Analyst is live in the ChatGPT plugin store." X (Twitter), May 22, 2023. https://x.com/willdepue/status/1660009091090227200 ↩
6. plugin.surf. "BizToc ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/biztoc ↩
7. plugin.surf. "AI News Roundup ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/ai-news-roundup ↩
8. plugin.surf. "World News ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/world-news ↩
9. plugin.surf. "UK Latest News ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/uk-latest-news ↩
10. plugin.surf. "Italy Latest News ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/italy-latest-news ↩
11. plugin.surf. "TechPulse ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/techpulse ↩
12. plugin.surf. "NewsPilot ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/newspilot ↩
13. plugin.surf. "Welt NewsVerse ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/welt-newsverse ↩
14. Persoenlich.com. "Axel Springer: Welt lanciert News-Plugin fur Chat GPT." June 26, 2023. https://www.persoenlich.com/digital/welt-lanciert-news-plugin-fur-chat-gpt ↩
15. plugin.surf. "BILD News ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/bild-news ↩
16. MixerBox. "Navigating the News with AI: MixerBox News Plugin for ChatGPT." July 21, 2023. https://www.mixerbox.com/blog/news ↩
17. plugin.surf. "Quick News Digest ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/quick-news-digest ↩
18. plugin.surf. "News (gpt-news.co) ChatGPT plugin." 2023. https://plugin.surf/plugin/news ↩
19. Axios. "Exclusive: AP strikes news-sharing and tech deal with OpenAI." July 13, 2023. https://www.axios.com/2023/07/13/ap-openai-news-sharing-tech-deal ↩
20. OpenAI. "Introducing GPTs." November 6, 2023. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/ ↩
21. OpenAI. "Partnership with Axel Springer to deepen beneficial use of AI in journalism." December 13, 2023. https://openai.com/index/axel-springer-partnership/ ↩
22. OpenAI. "Introducing the GPT Store." January 10, 2024. https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-gpt-store/ ↩
23. Prunckun, O. "A List Of All Approved ChatGPT Plugins As Of 2 July 2023." Medium, July 2, 2023. https://orren.medium.com/a-list-of-all-approved-chatgpt-plugins-as-of-2-july-2023-f82f5daaaab1 ↩
24. Medieninsider. "Plugin fur ChatGPT: Fake News im Namen von Springers Welt." 2023. https://medieninsider.com/plugin-fuer-chatgpt-fake-news-im-namen-von-springers-welt/18467/ ↩