The AI publisher licensing ledger: 45 deals signed since 2023, and the lawsuits running in parallel

Forty-seven disclosed publisher-AI deals have been signed since July 2023, two more than at this ledger's count a month ago, and the roster runs wider than newsrooms: stock-image agencies and B2B publishers hold rows alongside newspapers, and OpenAI's first India signings landed on 23 September, the day of this count. That is the top line of the licensing ledger assembled here: every disclosed publisher-AI deal since 2023, restructured from Press Gazette's continuously updated chronicle into deal-level fields, with the same treatment applied to the 29 publisher and platform lawsuits now on the roster, up from 27, one of which, Folha's case against OpenAI, has since been settled 1.

The ledger's second finding, a month on, has hardened: litigation and licensing have converged into one strategy. OpenAI is named in 17 of the roster's 29 suits by this ledger's count, even as Press Gazette's own summary still rounds the figure to "around a dozen" 1. Perplexity is being sued about as fast as it signs 1. And Anthropic holds zero news-publisher deal rows on the roster while its rights-suit docket keeps lengthening: Universal Music sued in October 2023, book authors in August 2024, Reddit in June 2025, and Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell on 29 August 2026 23.

What the ledger holds, and how it was built

Trade title Press Gazette maintains the beat's living chronicle of who is suing and who is signing 1. This ledger rebuilds that chronicle as data: 47 deal rows and 29 lawsuit entries as of 23 September 2026, against 45 and 27 at the previous count on 26 August. The deal tally follows the chronicle's summary roster plus any dated entry newer than it, which on count day meant OpenAI's two India signings, logged in the chronicle body that morning and not yet folded into the summary list. Each row carries counterparties, announcement date, content scope (training, real-time display, or both), duration where stated, and economics where reported. Rows that bundle several publishers count as one row. A deal counts as priced only if a dollar figure was disclosed or reported in coverage. The 45 in this page's headline is the count at launch; the ledger has since moved on. The timeline anchor is unchanged: the roster's oldest row of all is Shutterstock's deal with OpenAI, dated 11 July 2023, and the first news-publisher deal, Associated Press licensing its archive to OpenAI, came two days later, five months before The New York Times filed its lawsuit in December 2023 1.

Who paid, and who won't say

The rows with reported prices 1:

• News Corp and OpenAI: reported at more than $250m over five years, about $50m a year.
• News Corp and Meta: up to $50m a year, signed March 2026 for at least three years.
• The New York Times and Amazon: $20m to $25m a year, per the Wall Street Journal.
• Times of India publisher Bennett, Coleman and Co with OpenAI: reported at around $5m a year, and the Indian Express Group with OpenAI at around $3m a year, per E4m.
• Dotdash Meredith and OpenAI: at least $16m a year, per a later update on the original May 2024 deal.
• Seventeen publishers, among them the Associated Press, People Inc, USA Today Network and The Washington Post, licensing real-time content through Snowflake's Cortex platform on reported six-figure contracts, per Digiday.

A Reuters spokesperson said of its Meta deal: "The terms of these deals remain confidential." Gannett said the financial terms of its Perplexity agreement were "not being disclosed." Future plc disclosed only that its OpenAI payment "is not financially material." 1

The spread inside that silence is the story. OpenAI was reported in 2024 to be offering news organisations between $1m and $5m a year, which puts News Corp's reported rate at 10 to 50 times the opening offer 1. The India signings priced two more publishers inside that band, and at its ceiling: Bennett, Coleman's reported $5m a year matches the top of the reported opening offer 1. The biggest confirmed annual number in this market, Reddit's roughly $60m-a-year data deal with Google, belongs to a forum, not a newsroom 1. Thomson Reuters chief executive Steve Hasker said in March 2024 that "there appears to be a market price evolving" 1.

Suing versus signing: the ratio by developer

Counting each lawsuit against every defendant named, the per-developer ratios on the roster look like this 13:

• OpenAI: 17 lawsuits by roster count, a tally Press Gazette's own summary still glosses as "around a dozen". The freshest filings: how-to site Wikihow, on 22 August, and the Seattle Times and Newsday, jointly, on 7 September.
• Perplexity: seven lawsuits by roster count, a tally Press Gazette's own summary glosses as "around six", against five signing-programme rows, though those rows bundle roughly two dozen publishers including Time, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, Gannett and Getty.
• Microsoft: named in seven lawsuits, all filed jointly with OpenAI, against five deal rows; an eighth case, The Intercept's, names Microsoft only in a note outside its roster entry and so stays out of this count.
• Meta: zero news-publisher lawsuits on the roster against two rows, one of which bundles nine publishers including CNN, Fox News and USA Today.
• Google: one lawsuit, from Penske, against three rows, and its December 2025 publisher deals are explicitly not licensing deals.
• Anthropic: at least five rights suits since October 2023, zero news-publisher deal rows, and one publishing-industry suit reported settled at $1.5 billion 2.

Sign here, sue there

The lawsuits mostly follow failed negotiations, and the same publishers run both tracks at once. The New York Times negotiated with OpenAI for nine months, sued in December 2023, then in May 2025 signed what it called its first AI licensing agreement, with Amazon, at a reported $20m to $25m a year, and sued Perplexity seven months after that, in December 2025 1. CNN joined Meta's December 2025 licensing group, then sued Perplexity in May 2026 after licensing talks collapsed, warning there is "no free option" 1. The month's freshest suit closes a loop of its own: the Seattle Times and Newsday, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft jointly on 7 September, were both 2024 recipients of OpenAI and Microsoft grant funding through the Lenfest Institute, which paid for AI fellows in five US newsrooms 1. Argentina's Editorial Perfil, which sued the same pair in Buenos Aires on 26 August, is believed to be the first Spanish-language publisher to sue either company, and says it spent more than a year preparing the case after failing to get OpenAI to the table, pointing to the deals OpenAI struck with Prisa in Spain and Folha in Brazil 1. Reddit's suit against Perplexity cleared its first test on 31 July, when a federal judge largely rejected a motion to dismiss and found it plausible that Perplexity conspired with at least one third-party data scraper to bypass Reddit's access controls 1. News Corp is suing both Perplexity and the privacy-focused search engine Brave 1. The Guardian holds three deal rows of its own, with OpenAI, Google's pilot and Prorata, and is named as well inside the June 2025 Prorata row covering more than 500 publications, a row that counts once here like every bundle 1. It also co-filed the News/Media Alliance industry lawsuit against Cohere, an AI company valued at over $5 billion; Guardian Media Group chief executive Anna Bateson describes the Guardian as having signed agreements with numerous partners 4.

Read across the ledger, the pattern resolves into a two-track strategy: license with whoever pays, litigate against whoever will not, and never publish the price either way.

What would move these numbers

This is a living dataset, updated as deals land. Of the three movers this ledger flagged at its last count, one has landed: roster prices for single publishers now sit inside the band between the $1m offer floor and the $50m News Corp ceiling, from the India deals' roughly $3m and $5m a year to Dotdash Meredith's $16m 1. The other two stay open: the first Anthropic news-publisher signing, and a Perplexity settlement, which would move both sides of its ratio at once.