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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The same big tech companies that are stripping news publishers of site traffic are now dictating the terms of the emerging AI licensing market, and taking a significant cut in the process, according to a new report from the Open Markets Institute.

The report, “Same Gatekeepers, New Tollbooths: Mapping the AI Content Licensing Market,” argues that publishers are trapped in what the authors call a “double bind.” As Big Tech develops commercial AI products that siphon readers away from news sites, those same companies are positioning themselves as the gatekeepers of whatever alternative revenue streams emerge.

“Big Tech is occupying both sides of the value chain simultaneously,” write the authors, Courtney Radsch and Karina Montoya of the institute’s Center for Media & Digital Governance. They warn that “the deal structures, price precedents, intermediary take rates, and governance norms taking shape now will be difficult to revise once they are normalized.”

The report examines a growing ecosystem of AI content licensing marketplaces. Some are independent startups. Others are built by the very companies publishers are trying to negotiate with:

• ScalePost takes roughly 15% of revenue earned by rights holders.
• Cloudflare, which handles about 20% of global web traffic, takes an estimated 30% cut through its pay-per-crawl marketplace.
• ProRata.ai, which operates an answer engine built exclusively on licensed content, splits subscription and advertising revenue 50/50 with publishers. More than 500 publishers had signed up as of last summer.
• TollBit and Sphere.ai allow publishers to retain 100% of their revenue, instead charging AI companies a separate transaction fee.
• Microsoft’s Publisher Content Marketplace, announced in February, follows a pay-per-use model — but it’s not yet clear how much Microsoft will keep.

The report points to Spotify as a benchmark: despite a 30% take rate, the streaming model allowed music rights holders to earn significant revenue and stabilize the industry during a turbulent transition. The authors argue similar scrutiny is needed for AI licensing marketplaces, particularly when Big Tech is building the scaffolding.

“Regulatory attention is warranted on these platform operators in order to mitigate their data access advantages and ability to set de facto and potentially coercive standards for an industry in which no independent standards yet exist,” the authors write.

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