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AI Training Data Licensing Deal Statistics: 2026 Report

By Darin ten Bruggencate, Founder, AI Industry Reviews · October 6, 2026

AI developers that once collected training data from the open web now increasingly pay for it. They sign licensing agreements with publishers, platforms, image libraries and data brokers. Many of those deals are announced without a price, so the market is hard to size.

Our analysts counted 312 of those agreements signed between January 2023 and September 2026. We drew on company announcements, regulatory filings, court records and confirmed press reports. Values were disclosed or reliably reported for 147 deals, and every dollar figure comes from those, expressed as an annual value. Quarterly deal volume rose from 3 in Q1 2023 to 39 in Q3 2026, while the median annual value of a deal fell from $9.4M in Q2 2023 to $3.6M.

In the following sections, we break deals down by licensor, quarter and buyer, explain how they are structured, and compare training data prices per unit.

AI Training Data Licensing Deals by Licensor Type

The table below shows how many deals each type of content owner signed, the median annual value of those deals, and how often the agreement also granted rights to display the content in AI answers as well as train on it.

AI Training Data Licensing Deals by Licensor Type, 2026

Deal counts and deal values favored different licensors:

• We found that news publishers signed one-third of all deals in the dataset, 104 of 312, but their deals had a median annual value of $4.2M, below the $4.6M median for all licensors.
• Our data showed that social and forum platforms signed only 18 deals at a median annual value of $38.0M, the highest of any licensor type, because a single platform can supply large volumes of current, conversational text.
• For content owners, what they own shapes what they can earn from AI licensing. News publishers signed 104 of 312 deals at a median $4.2M a year, while social platforms signed 18 at $38.0M. Owners of large, unique datasets are likely to keep commanding the highest prices.

AI Training Data Licensing Deals by Quarter, Q1 2023 to Q3 2026

The pace of dealmaking rose in almost every quarter we tracked. The table below shows the number of deals signed each quarter and the median annual value of those with disclosed terms, followed by a graph of quarterly and cumulative deal counts.

AI Training Data Licensing Deals by Quarter, 2026

The quarterly data led our team to three conclusions:

• We found that quarterly deal volume rose from 3 deals in Q1 2023 to 39 in Q3 2026, with a single decline in Q3 2025.
• Our data showed that median annual deal value fell from $9.4M in Q2 2023 to $3.6M in Q3 2026 as AI developers moved from a few large platform agreements to many smaller agreements with niche and regional licensors.
• AI licensing is becoming a high-volume market of smaller deals. Deals rose from 3 a quarter in 2023 to 39 in Q3 2026, while median annual value fell from $9.4M to $3.6M. Smaller and niche content owners are likely to find more buyers, though at lower prices.

AI Training Data Licensing Deals by Buyer Type

We grouped buyers into five categories. The table below shows how many deals each category signed and what it paid.

AI Training Data Licensing Deals by Buyer Type, 2026

Frontier model developers, the companies building the largest general-purpose AI models, and large technology platforms together signed 209 deals, 67.0% of the total, and paid the highest median annual values at $7.1M and $8.4M. AI search and answer engines signed 43 deals at a much lower median of $1.9M, and their agreements were weighted toward news content and display rights, since these products need current information that they can quote and link. Data marketplaces and intermediaries, which license content from many small owners and resell it as packaged datasets, accounted for 21 deals and are the fastest-growing buyer category in the most recent quarters of our data.

How AI Training Data Licensing Deals Are Structured

The way buyers pay for data has shifted over the period. The table below compares the primary payment structure of deals signed in 2023 with those signed in 2026 through September.

Payment Structures of AI Training Data Licensing Deals, 2026

Three patterns in the deal structure data stood out to us:

• We found that flat annual fees fell from 58.3% of deals in 2023 to 34.8% in 2026, though they remained the most common structure.
• Our data showed that usage-based fees, which pay licensors according to how often their content is retrieved or used, more than doubled their share, from 12.5% to 26.8%.
• Payment terms are shifting toward models that pay for actual use. Flat fees fell from 58.3% to 34.8% of deals, while usage-based fees rose to 26.8% and revenue share to 13.4%. Licensors are likely to tie more income to how often AI products use their content.

AI Training Data Prices per Unit

A subset of deals, mostly with image libraries, video sources, audio providers, and book publishers, priced content per unit. The table below gives the median of those unit prices and the interquartile range, which runs from the 25th percentile price to the 75th percentile price.

AI Training Data Prices per Unit, 2026

Unit prices at the 75th percentile were five to nine times those at the 25th percentile for every content type. Three characteristics explained most of that range in the deals we examined: exclusivity, the presence of rich metadata such as captions and rights information, and whether the content was already publicly accessible online. Video footage commanded the strongest price growth over the period, as developers of video generation models competed for licensed, high-resolution footage with clear rights.

What AI Training Data Licensing Trends Mean for 2027 and Beyond

AI companies now pay for training content far more often, but each deal is smaller as they spread money across more sources. That opens a way to earn for smaller publishers and platforms that were not part of the first round of big deals.

Deals are moving from one-time fees toward payments tied to how much the content is used. That could give content owners steadier income over time, but it also ties their earnings to how successful the AI products are. Court rulings on copyright could push prices up or down quickly.

So if you own content that AI companies might want, ask for terms tied to use rather than a single fee, because that is the direction deals are moving.