AI data licensing deals, 2023 to 2026: the sourced list.

A deal is listed only if one side announced it, a securities filing or court sale discloses it, or a major outlet reported it. Every row links to the page we read when we checked it. The date at the top is the last time every source was reopened.

“Not disclosed” means a source says the terms were not released. “No figure published” means the announcement gives no price and we found no credible report of one. “Reported” means a news outlet gave a figure the companies did not confirm; each such row names the outlet. Figures from Reddit, IAC, Informa and Wiley come from their own filings or results.

Some deals license archives for model training. Others pay for content shown inside a chatbot or search answer. The “What was licensed” column says which when the source does.

To cite this page: Allied Advantage Assets, “AI data licensing deals, 2023 to 2026,” alliedassets.ai/ai-data-licensing-deals/, last checked 27 October 2026.

Twenty-five deals. Numbers in each row point to the sources at the foot of the page.

Almost every row is published content. Twenty-four of the 25 license news, books, images, reference pages or public forum posts. One, the Spirit Airlines sale, covers a company’s internal work records.

Most prices stay private. Fourteen rows carry no figure. Of the eleven that do, five come from the companies’ own filings or results, five are press reports the companies never confirmed, and one is a court-supervised auction.

OpenAI is the buyer in eleven rows, all signed in 2023 and 2024. From 2025 the buyers spread out to Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity.

The purpose is moving from archives to live answers. AP now feeds real-time news to Google’s Gemini app,¹⁸ Meta’s publisher deals supply news for Meta AI,²² and Nine’s journalism appears in Copilot answers.²⁵

Licensing has become a repeat line of revenue for some publishers. Wiley’s AI license revenue reached $49.1 million in its fiscal 2026, and $19.4 million of that came from content Wiley had itself licensed from other publishers.¹⁷

The list is mostly publishers because publishers announce. A media company benefits when readers and advertisers hear that AI labs pay for its work. A company licensing its Slack or Teams history, Zendesk tickets, Salesforce records or GitHub code has no such reason, so most of that market never reaches the press.

The one large workplace-records sale on the record came through a bankruptcy court. Google outbid the AI data company Mercor for Spirit Airlines’ archive: 100 million emails, 500 million Teams messages and 176,000 employee records, for $10 million.²⁷

Court sales are public, and they draw objections. Spirit’s flight attendants’ union objected to the sale on privacy grounds.²⁷ The Bankruptcy Code bars a trustee from selling personally identifiable information against the debtor’s own privacy policy unless the sale fits the policy or a consumer privacy ombudsman is appointed first.²⁸ The statute defines that information by reference to products or services bought for personal, family, or household purposes.²⁹ On its face, that protects customers more than staff.

Smaller sales happen when startups close. Wind-down firms now sell code and workspace data to AI labs. One of them, Sunset, told MIT Technology Review that it values a client’s data by head count, years in operation, volume and how the team used its tools. The same article reports that buyers quote very different numbers and that sellers often cannot see who is buying.²⁷

No operating company has announced a license of its own email, chat or CRM history. That does not mean none exist. It means none are public yet, and this list will add the first one that is. Which kinds of buyer are active is covered in who buys AI training data; what sets the fee is in what company data is worth.

A company that is still running does not need an auction. It can license an anonymized copy of its records to an AI lab and keep the originals. Allied arranges it, and never sees the data.

What happens: a short questionnaire, then a discovery call about your systems and policies. A written offer naming the lab follows in one to two weeks. Names, contact details and customer identities are removed before anything leaves, and you approve a sample. Payment arrives by wire 30 to 60 days after the lab accepts delivery.

The license is non-exclusive. The usual fit is 30 or more office employees with more than a year of history. A typical license runs $100K–⁠$2M. The clauses are explained in AI data licensing agreements and the legal checks in is it legal to sell company data. Request an offer, see the six systems labs license, or read how Allied works.