Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the former hosts of The New York Times technology podcast “Hard Fork,” are in talks for a new podcast deal that could be worth up to $5 million annually, according to Bloomberg. The prospective agreement would fund “Machine Gods,” the AI-focused show the pair are building through the independent media venture they launched after leaving the NYT.

The reported talks follow a June signing when Roose and Newton joined United Talent Agency for representation as they prepared their exit. In June, Roose announced he would leave his NYT columnist role in August after nine years, and Newton, who also runs the independent newsletter “Platformer,” is joining him to build a new media company centered on a show covering artificial intelligence. “Our goal is to take the thing that makes ‘Hard Fork’ work and extend it into new formats and directions,” Roose wrote on X at the time of the UTA signing.

“Hard Fork” launched in 2022 as a technology podcast before shifting its coverage toward AI as the sector expanded. Roose and Newton used the show to interview OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The podcast concluded in August, coinciding with Roose’s NYT departure.

The counterparty and structure of the reported deal have not been disclosed. It remains unclear whether the figure represents a guaranteed fee, an advertising commitment, a production budget or some combination, and whether the money would come from a single technology company, a distributor or another type of backer.

Newton’s “Platformer” newsletter, which moved from Substack to the publishing platform Ghost in 2024, has 215,000 subscribers. Roose is also working on a book titled “The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.”

The UTA signing came during a run of creator deals at the agency, which also recently signed outdoor lifestyle creator Steven Rinella and his company MeatEater for representation across multiple formats, along with beauty and lifestyle creator Golloria George for global representation.

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