Publishers are quietly cutting six-figure AI licensing deals through Snowflake’s Cortex platform, according Digiday, as the market for enterprise content licensing begins to take shape.

The Washington Post, Associated Press, People Inc., and USA Today Network are just three of 17 publishers that have signed on to Cortex Knowledge Extensions, Snowflake’s product for connecting locked-down publisher content to enterprise AI tools via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Instead of scraping or exposing raw feeds, publishers can let enterprises query their paywalled or proprietary content inside Snowflake’s AI environment — and get paid for it.

Ben Srour, principal product manager at Snowflake, told Digiday the deals are real and structured in ways that make them easier for enterprises to sign. Contracts are either flat-fee licenses or usage-based, and often paid out of an enterprise customer’s existing multi-year spending commitment to Snowflake, so there’s no new procurement line required.

“You cannot scrape the data—you can’t steal it and use it for model training,” he said. “So that’s why the product has really resonated with publishers.”

Snowflake is not alone in the space. The Financial Times and The Economist have previously signaled interest in RAG royalties from opening their archives to private LLMs. AP’s chief revenue officer, Kristin Heitmann, has said the Snowflake exchange opens “unlimited use cases” covering finance companies, supply chain monitoring, crisis management, and regulatory awareness.

Snowflake’s pitch to publishers includes a point that stands out: it doesn’t take a cut of licensing deals. Snowflake makes money through storage and compute when AI queries run inside its environment. Publishers and enterprise buyers negotiate terms directly.

Snowflake also recently committed $6 billion over five years to Amazon Web Services for custom chips and AI infrastructure, a signal of how much the company is betting on AI workloads.

Not everyone is celebratory. A report from the Open Markets Institute published in April warned that AI licensing marketplaces—where AI companies pay publishers for access to articles, archives, and data—risk repeating the power imbalances of the platform era, citing the take rates platforms charge. Snowflake’s no-revenue-share model is a direct counter to that criticism.

On the enterprise side, the keenest adopters so far are financial services and marketing or communications teams already deep into building AI tools on their own data and looking for trusted external signals to plug in. Most other enterprises are still getting internal AI models and data governance in order before leaning into paid publisher content, Srour said.

Snowflake is designing Cortex for where it believes AI is going: away from chatbots and toward always-on agents quietly working in the background.

“A year ago we were talking a lot about chatbots… but very quickly things are moving into this, like, agentic, automated world,” Srour said. “What do they need? They need data. They need context. They need to know what’s happening in the world.”

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On Thursday, the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and the Financial Times announced SPUR—the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition—with an open letter calling on media companies worldwide to join the fight for AI content licensing frameworks.

“Our reporting, our archives, our original content, have become foundational training material for AI systems,” the letter states. “This material has been scraped, copied and reused with no common standards to enable permission or payment, weakening the economic model that supports journalism.”

The coalition’s five signatories—BBC director-general Tim Davie, Sky News executive chairman David Rhodes, Guardian CEO Anna Bateson, Telegraph CEO Anna Jones, and Financial Times CEO Jon Slade—argue that AI systems built on journalistic content lack transparency about how they generate answers. That opacity, they say, risks eroding public trust in both news and the AI tools people use to access it.

SPUR’s mission is explicit: establish shared technical standards and licensing frameworks that let AI developers access journalism legitimately while guaranteeing publishers retain control of their content and receive compensation.

This isn’t just a negotiating tactic. The coalition positions itself as a bridge between media companies and AI labs, promising to create “rights-cleared, accountable channels” for content access—essentially, a middle ground between total lockdown and unrestricted scraping. Interested publishers can contact [email protected] to join.

For newsrooms already investing in AI tools, SPUR’s emergence matters. The coalition is explicitly positioning this as a global challenge, not a UK-only issue. That means the frameworks they develop could influence how AI training operates everywhere.

The open letter doesn’t name specific AI companies, but the timing is pointed: OpenAI has been sued by The New York Times over alleged copyright infringement related to training data. Anthropic and Google face similar legal pressure. SPUR appears designed to create a negotiated alternative to courtroom battles.

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On Feb. 10, the European Publishers Council filed a complaint with European Union authorities alleging Google mines press articles to train its artificial intelligence tools without permission or payment to newsrooms. The organization represents hundreds of media outlets across the continent.

The complaint targets Google’s AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. These summaries pull from news articles written by journalists but provide no compensation to the publishers who produced them, according to the council.

“This complaint is not about resisting innovation or artificial intelligence,” Christian van Thillo, the council’s chairman, said in a statement. “It is about stopping a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take publishers’ content without consent, without fair compensation, and without giving publishers any realistic way to protect their journalism.”

The numbers tell a stark story. According to an analysis by Debug Lies, Google’s AI previews have reduced publishers’ traffic by 33 percent worldwide since their deployment. Fewer clicks means fewer visitors and less advertising revenue for news organizations already struggling with business model challenges.

Publishers face what the council calls an impossible choice. Google offers tools that let websites opt out of AI previews, but doing so also means losing visibility in traditional search results. Media outlets must either accept that their work feeds Google’s AI for free or become invisible to internet users searching for news.

The complaint arrives as European regulators are already investigating Google’s search engine practices. The European Commission opened an investigation in December 2025. Teresa Ribera, EU executive vice president, mentioned emergency measures in February 2026 to limit damage to the media sector without waiting for the investigation’s conclusion.

If authorities side with publishers, Google could be forced to deploy an automated compensation system similar to the 2019 European copyright directive but on a much larger scale.

For newsrooms, the case raises a fundamental question about the future of the web: Who pays when artificial intelligence feeds on human journalism? The European decision could set a global precedent for how tech platforms compensate media companies whose content trains AI systems.

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Microsoft announced its Publisher Content Marketplace on Feb. 4, a platform designed to broker licensing deals between AI companies and publishers. The marketplace lets publishers control how their content is licensed for AI training and receive payment based on actual usage.

The platform, called PCM, functions as a central hub where publishers license text, images and other media to AI developers under terms they set. Microsoft positions it as infrastructure for what it calls “the agentic web,” where AI agents will increasingly mediate information access.

The marketplace addresses a friction point in AI development: companies need training data, publishers want compensation, but negotiating individual deals is slow and opaque. PCM standardizes the process with usage tracking and per-use payment models.

Major publishers have already signed licensing deals outside this marketplace. News Corp struck agreements with both Google and OpenAI. The Associated Press, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Axel Springer, The Washington Post and TIME have all licensed content to AI companies in individual negotiations.

Microsoft’s marketplace changes the dynamic from bilateral negotiations to a platform model. Publishers post their content and terms. AI developers browse and license what they need. Microsoft handles the technical infrastructure and presumably takes a percentage, though the company has not disclosed marketplace fees.

The timing matters. Meta signed multiyear licensing deals with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, Le Monde Group and others in December 2025 to bring real-time news into its Meta AI assistant. These deals happened before Microsoft’s marketplace launched, suggesting appetite for systematic content licensing continues to grow.

For newsrooms, the marketplace represents another revenue option in a landscape where direct traffic from AI-powered search threatens existing business models. Digiday reported in December that publishers give Big Tech’s AI licensing deals mixed grades, with concerns about appearing in AI search products that cannibalize their own traffic channels.

The marketplace model could make licensing more accessible to smaller publishers who lack resources for complex contract negotiations. But questions remain about pricing power, usage verification and whether per-use payments will generate meaningful revenue compared to lump-sum deals some publishers have negotiated directly.

OpenAI reportedly plans to retire several models including GPT-4.1 in February 2026, according to Future Tools. That kind of model churn could complicate licensing agreements tied to specific AI systems rather than platform-level deals.

Microsoft’s marketplace is live now, starting with Copilot as the first AI builder using licensed content.

The debate over AI licensing comes as newsrooms grapple with whether to pursue litigation or negotiation with AI companies. Some publishers view licensing as a pragmatic revenue stream, while others worry about AI scrapers bypassing their protections entirely.

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