AI Content Licensing Deals: June 2026 Update

91 public AI licensing deals reveal how the market is evolving—and where it's heading next.

AI content licensing deals are still thriving from where I sit (currently on vacation in Oahu, Hawaii, with my family — I love my family, but I also love AI licensing, so I just had to get this out!).

I’ve been tracking these AI licensing deals since January 2023. My spreadsheet is up to 91 publicly announced/reported on deals.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on total deal volume.

My friend JC Cangilla (former Meta content dealmaker) says that for every public deal there could be 50 to 100 private deals (never announced).

But the 91 public deals do tell us a lot.

Below are some key charts of my data.

At the end, I give my takeaways.

My Takes on the AI Content Licensing Data

• AI content licensing is not slowing down — it’s accelerating. The growth curve is steep: 0 deals in 2022 → 12 in 2023 → 28 in 2024 → projected 36 in 2026. Even with a dip in 2025, the projected rebound suggests the market is becoming infrastructure, not experimentation.

• OpenAI is dramatically ahead in deal volume with 24 publicly announced agreements — almost double Microsoft and Meta. This suggests OpenAI sees proprietary content access as a strategic moat, not just legal protection. I also think OpenAI wants to signal to content owners that they’re professional and willing to engage with the media industry seriously. Sam Altman has had a front-row seat to the media world through investments like Reddit, and he tends to think long-term. OpenAI appears willing to spend heavily on licensing both to reduce lawsuit risk and to build goodwill with publishers whose cooperation they may increasingly need over time.

• Where is Anthropic? — Anthropic has never disclosed a public deal (though they agreed to pay $1.5B to authors to settle a lawsuit). Marty Pesis of Troveo (a data provider) says he thinks Anthropic has paid to license content (but they’ve done it privately). With their giant round of recent funding and upcoming IPO, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them finally announcedeals.

• News publishers dominate the licensing economy. News/journalism accounts for 48 deals — far ahead of music/audio (16) and images/video (12). That implies AI companies value constantly refreshed, real-time text more than static archives alone.

• The market is shifting from “training data” to “live access.” One of the strongest charts is the rise in attribution/live-access deals: 2 in 2023 → 11 in 2024 → 18 in 2025 → projected 34 in 2026. That’s a huge directional signal that AI companies increasingly want ongoing feeds, links, grounding, attribution, and real-time data — not just one-time training dumps.

• No single publisher has dominant leverage. Even the largest publishers only have single-digit deal counts (Shutterstock 7, Wikimedia/Wikipedia 6, Reddit 5). Meanwhile “Other” publishers collectively account for 36 deals. That fragmentation suggests AI firms are spreading risk broadly. And that long-tail content owners may still have monetizable leverage.

• Content Goes Multimodal. The AI licensing deals started with text but now span multiple content modalities including images, video, music/audio, voice/likeness, and structured data/APIs. Marty Pesis of Troveo recently told me that an AI company paid him for a database of dog barks!

Footnotes

Below are the sources for my 91 deals. Many are from the companies themselves issuing press releases. But many sources come from amazing reporters in the space. They include:

Reuters on Big Tech AI training-data licensing, Reuters/WSJ on The New York Times–Google deal, AP on the AP–OpenAI deal, Axios on AP–OpenAI, OpenAI on Axel Springer, TechCrunch on Axel Springer–OpenAI, PetaPixel on Bria’s licensed-data approach, Stability AI’s Stable Audio paper, Runway–Getty, Axios on Runway–Getty, Reuters on Reddit–Google, TechCrunch on Reddit data licensing, OpenAI on Le Monde and Prisa, OpenAI on Financial Times, OpenAI on News Corp, OpenAI on The Atlantic, OpenAI on Vox Media, OpenAI on TIME, OpenAI on Condé Nast, OpenAI on Hearst, OpenAI on Axios, OpenAI on Guardian Media Group, OpenAI on Disney/Sora, OpenAI on Grupo Folha and Grupo UOL;

Plus reporting/announcements from Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Information, AdWeek, Digiday, The Verge, MarketWatch, Barron’s, Sifted, The Hollywood Reporter, The Bookseller, Portada, Variety, 404 Media, TechCrunch, Reuters, AP, Axios, and company materials from Microsoft, Meta, Google, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Shutterstock, Getty Images, ICE, Spotify, Universal Music Group, RavenPack, Bria, Sonilo, and others.

---

Thanks for reading,

Rob Kelly

Founder & CEO of Media & the Machine

p.s. How to reach me? —The best way is to subscribe below and reply to any of my emails. There’s a free option — and your reply comes directly to my inbox.