Amazon plans marketplace to dominate AI content licensing

Amazon is getting ready to create a new platform where news organizations and other publishers can sell their work to companies building artificial intelligence systems, according to a report from The Information published Monday.

The online retail giant has been talking with publishing executives about the project, which would let Amazon Web Services act as a middleman between media companies and AI developers. Internal documents show the company has been sharing details about the planned marketplace ahead of a company conference taking place on Tuesday.

Two people who discussed the project with Amazon told The Information that AWS distributed slides mentioning the content marketplace. The documents group the new platform alongside existing Amazon tools like Bedrock and Quick Suite when showing publishers what products they can use.

Amazon shifts from selling tools to controlling content

This marks a different approach from how Amazon has handled content deals before. The company previously made individual agreements, such as a reported $20 million yearly deal to show certain news content through Alexa. The new marketplace would create a standard system that can grow larger, making quality content easier for business customers to access and use.

Amazon is changing its role in how AI systems get built. The company already sells computing power through Nvidia chips and its own Trainium hardware. It also offers large language models that form the base of AI products. Now Amazon wants to control another piece: the human-created content that these systems need to work correctly and stay within legal boundaries.

The timing matters because publishers and AI companies are fighting over how online content gets used. News organizations want to get paid based on how much their material is actually used, whether companies are training AI models or using content to answer user questions.

People who follow the industry say the days of AI companies freely taking whatever content they want are over. Publishers have watched their advertising money shrink for ten years. Now they worry AI-created summaries will make fewer people click through to their actual websites. They want AI companies to pay like drivers on a toll road.

Will smaller publishers get left behind?

Microsoft jumped into this space last week, announcing plans for its own Publisher Content Marketplace. The system lets publishers set their own prices based on tracking how much their content gets used. Both Microsoft and Amazon are racing to become the main platform where journalism gets licensed, similar to how app stores work for software.

Amazon gave a careful response when asked about the report. A company spokesperson said Amazon had “nothing specific to share” but mentioned the company has worked with publishers for a long time and keeps coming up with new ideas.

Still, Amazon faces real pressure to make these publisher relationships official. Big names like The Associated Press and News Corp have already signed individual deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Smaller publishers might get left out unless there’s a central marketplace where they can band together and show their combined value.

These new marketplaces show that the free-for-all period of AI companies grabbing data is ending. The industry is moving toward organized licensing systems. How well an AI product works may soon depend less on its technology and more on which content it can legally use through business deals.

As AWS and Microsoft build these trading platforms, one big question remains: will the money flowing back to publishers be enough to keep their businesses alive? These are the same organizations creating the content that AI systems depend on in the first place.

Get seen where it counts. Advertise in Cryptopolitan Research and reach crypto’s sharpest investors and builders.