Generative AI & Licensing

Alongside the rapid rise of generative AI, a new licensing market has begun to emerge for AI training data.

Since mid-2023, AI companies have been pursuing licensing deals with media rights holders to secure access to their content and use it as high-quality data to train powerful AI models of any modality, notably including text, image, music and video.

To date, more than two dozen content owner deals with AI developers have been publicly confirmed, according to VIP+ research. A diverse range of publisher types are now engaged in licensing, with dealmaking rampant among news publishers, stock image companies and platforms such as Reddit and Stack Overflow.

Yet the licensing market for generative AI is coming to fruition in a contentious and uncertain legal environment. In the U.S., rights holders spanning publishers, authors, artists and creators have respectively filed lawsuits charging AI companies — including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Stability AI and Anthropic — with copyright infringement for training models on their content without a license.

In a break with how licensing regimes have developed in the past, all licensing for generative AI right now occurs in a legal gray zone. While convictions fall on either side of fair use and other debates, no litigation outcome, legislation or regulation has yet concretely established a legal basis for content licensing to occur.

Instead, this fledgling market is progressing not because licensing is definitively required but because AI companies need or want to license.

Significant questions and challenges remain for media rights holders. Given the rapid development and widespread commercial rollout of gen AI, licensing, lawsuits and policymaking are instead proceeding at the same time and with limited information amid a haze of legal uncertainty.

In this special report, VIP+ investigates the emerging and fast-evolving state of content licensing for generative AI training, with data on the varying mixes of incentives and risks of licensing for each type of media rights holder, including news publishers, music labels, stock image companies and film and TV studios.

Finally, the report provides a thorough analysis of remaining legal questions whose outcomes will determine how licensing regimes form and ultimately settle.