Deal roundup
AI data licensing deals grouped by data type
Quick answer
Publicly announced AI data licensing deals span several distinct data types: news articles (AP, Axel Springer, News Corp), images and video (Shutterstock, Photobucket, Veritone), forum and community posts (Reddit, Stack Overflow, Automattic's Tumblr/WordPress), books (HarperCollins), and scientific or academic content (Taylor & Francis, Wiley). Deal structures and disclosed terms vary widely by data type, and most financial details remain undisclosed.
What was reported#
- News text and journalism deals include AP-OpenAI, Axel Springer-OpenAI, News Corp-OpenAI and Financial Times-OpenAI, mostly announced from 2023 to 2025.
- Image, video and music licensing deals include Shutterstock's six-year OpenAI agreement and Photobucket's reported talks to license its 13-billion-item archive.
- Forum and social content deals include Reddit's agreements with Google (about $60 million a year) and OpenAI, plus Automattic's reported Tumblr/WordPress data sharing with OpenAI and Midjourney.
- Book publishing deals include HarperCollins's Microsoft agreement paying authors roughly $2,500-$5,000 per opted-in title.
- Academic and scientific content deals include Taylor & Francis's Microsoft agreement (over $10 million in year one) and Wiley's $49 million in fiscal 2026 AI licensing revenue.
- Exact per-deal values are disclosed for only a minority of these agreements; most companies have declined to share financial terms.
Related deals
SourceX was not a party to these deals. This tracker summarizes public reporting so businesses can see how AI data licensing is developing.
Sources
Public sources, checked 2026-10-09. SourceX is not affiliated with the organizations named.
- Reuters: Inside Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data reuters.com
- Ars Technica: Reddit cashes in on AI gold rush with $203M in LLM training license fees arstechnica.com
- Publishers Weekly: AI, Research Drive Gains at Wiley in Fiscal 2026 publishersweekly.com
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