Deal roundup
Which industries are licensing data to AI companies
Quick answer
Based on publicly verified deals, five industries stand out for licensing content to AI companies: news and magazine publishing (AP, Axel Springer, News Corp, Condé Nast, Hearst and many others), stock imagery and video (Shutterstock, Photobucket, Veritone), online communities and forums (Reddit, Stack Overflow, Automattic's Tumblr/WordPress), trade book publishing (HarperCollins), and academic and scientific publishing (Taylor & Francis, Wiley). No official cross-industry total is publicly disclosed.
What was reported#
- News and magazine publishers represent the largest visible group of disclosed deals, including AP, Axel Springer, News Corp, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Hearst, Time, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Financial Times, Le Monde, Guardian Media Group and Washington Post.
- Stock imagery, video and archive licensing includes Shutterstock's six-year OpenAI deal, Photobucket's reported talks to license 13 billion images, and Veritone's 2026 video deal with The Washington Post.
- Online community and developer-knowledge platforms include Reddit (Google and OpenAI) and Stack Overflow (Google and OpenAI), plus Automattic's reported Tumblr/WordPress data sharing.
- Trade book publishing is represented by HarperCollins's Microsoft deal, which pays opted-in authors per book title.
- Academic and scientific publishing includes Taylor & Francis's Microsoft deal and Wiley's $49 million in fiscal 2026 AI licensing revenue from customers including OpenEvidence and Anthropic.
- No publicly disclosed figure totals AI data licensing revenue across all these industries combined.
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
- Publishers Weekly: AI, Research Drive Gains at Wiley in Fiscal 2026 publishersweekly.com
- Ars Technica: Reddit cashes in on AI gold rush with $203M in LLM training license fees arstechnica.com
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