Nicholas Thompson
CEO of The Atlantic
Former Wired editor-in-chief who now runs The Atlantic, hosts “The Most Interesting Thing in AI,” posts daily AI videos to millions of followers, and signed one of publishing’s first OpenAI licensing deals — a “devil’s bargain,” his own newsroom said.
In his words
AI is coming, it is coming quickly. We want to be part of whatever transition happens. Transition might be bad, the transition might be good, but we believe the odds of it being good for journalism and the kind of work we do with The Atlantic are higher if we participate in it.
We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future.
Biography
Nicholas Thompson (born 1975) edited NewYorker.com, ran Wired as editor-in-chief through the techlash years, and became CEO of The Atlantic in 2021. He is also a competitive masters runner whose memoir The Running Ground became a bestseller — but online, he is best known as one of AI’s most tireless explainers.
Evangelist with a P&L
His daily “The Most Interesting Thing in Tech” videos — a one-man AI news bulletin — helped make him one of LinkedIn’s most-followed voices, with an audience in the millions, and spun off “The Most Interesting Thing in AI” podcast. The register is curious and upbeat: he calls himself a rational techno-enthusiast, spotlighting uses of AI from preserving Yemeni musical forms to safety tools, alongside candid worries about sycophantic models.
In May 2024 he put the company where his mouth was, signing a two-year licensing deal that put The Atlantic’s archive into ChatGPT — among the first such deals in publishing, announced the same day as Vox Media’s. Atlantic writers revolted; the magazine even published a piece calling it “a devil’s bargain.” Thompson’s defense on The Verge’s Decoder was pragmatic: journalism’s odds are better inside the transition than outside it, a sharp contrast with The New York Times, which chose to sue.
He has kept steering into the storm since — building an internal AI task force as search traffic to publishers collapsed, and arguing that media must design for a web navigated by AI agents rather than pretend the old referral economy will return.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/nicholas-thompson