AI data licensing deals: a dated roundup
The short answer
Public AI data licensing deals fall into two groups. Company-data deals are few and recent. The largest is Google's $10M winning bid for Spirit Airlines' archive, pending court approval. Content deals are older and bigger, like Reddit and Google at about $60 million a year.
Here is a dated list of public prices. Each row says who reported it. A second table covers the content deals that sit next to the company-data market.
Which company-data deals have a public figure?
| Deal | Date | Reported figure | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google's winning bid for Spirit Airlines' archive, pending court approval | Aug 2026 | $10M winning bid. Mercor alternate at $7.5M | Time, ombudsman's report for the alternate bidder |
| micro1 offer for the same archive | 14 Sep 2026 | $12.5M | Fortune |
| SimpleClosure Asset Hub | Apr 2026 | Nearly 100 deals, $10,000 to $100,000 each | Gizmodo |
| Mercor offers to shuttered startups | Aug 2026 | Up to $300,000, reported | BigGo summary of The Information |
The Spirit sale has no court approval yet. See the Spirit Airlines data sale for its status, and the deals tracker for each figure as it changes.
Which content deals sit next to it?
| Deal | Date | Reported figure | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reddit and Google | Feb 2024 | About $60M a year | Reuters, via The Decoder |
| Reddit, licensing revenue | Aug 2026 | $43M "other revenue" in Q2 2026, about 5% of revenue | Yahoo Finance |
| Shutterstock AI licensing | Jun 2024 | $104M in 2023, per its CEO | Bloomberg Law |
| News Corp and OpenAI | May 2024 | About $250M over five years, per the WSJ | VentureBeat |
Publishers' own filings add a revenue view. Wiley reported $49.1M of AI license revenue for its year to April 2026 in Wiley's 2026 10-K. What publishers earn from AI licensing reads those numbers for a private company.
These content deals license published content with a clear source. A company's internal records are a different product. The deals show that buyers pay for licensed data. They say little about what an email or ticket archive earns.
What does Troveo say it has paid?
Troveo says it has paid more than $20 million to rights holders across video, audio, gaming, robotics and now business data (its guide, self-reported). The total covers every data type, so it can't stand in for what company-data owners get.
What do the deals have in common?
Each public price attaches to a whole archive, a whole catalog or a company's published headline. No source I read publishes a price per record, per token or per employee.
Reddit adds a dry footnote. Yahoo Finance's report on its results says licensing is "immaterial today" next to advertising, which brought in $762 million in the same quarter.
How should you read a roundup?
I check three things: the date, the reporter, and whether the number is a bid, a completed sale or a buyer's claim. My pricing models page explains how deals pay. Who buys company data compares the buyers. The rights check comes before any price talk.
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