By Jessica Davies
Publication Date: 2026-02-12 05:01:00
This week’s Media Briefing examines how Amazon is the latest tech giant trying to turn the problem of AI scraping publishers’ content for free into a structured marketplace — if it can get LLMs to pay up.
The race among tech companies to scale AI licensing infrastructure is officially underway.
With Amazon pushing toward launching its own content marketplace, publishers should have another route to license content for AI, while tech companies race to control the underlying infrastructure.
Details remain scarce, beyond the fact that publishers provide the supply while AI model developers represent the demand side. But Amazon Web Services reportedly previewed the idea with publishers ahead of its publisher symposium in NYC on Feb. 10. One attendee told Digiday they were expecting to hear more about Amazon’s AI content marketplace plans, but nothing was announced at the event.
Meanwhile, six months after it began its AI content marketplace pilot, Microsoft brought in…
