USA – NEW YORK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Nancy E Wolff, Scott J Sholder and Elizabeth Safran, Cowan DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard LLP
October 2025). Warner Music Group developed a sim - ilar opt-in licensing deal with Udio, to be launched in 2026. See W arner Music Group and Udio Collabo- rate to Build a New Licensed Music Creation Service , WMG Press Release (19 November 2025). As the resolution of high-profile AI lawsuits has begun to demonstrate, collaboration between rights-holders, content aggregators and AI developers is possible, and arguably represents the natural resolution to dis - putes over infringement liability and the ever-thorny fair use doctrine. As a result of the myriad infringement cases, as well as for independent market-driven rea - sons, content owners and AI developers have begun to establish a new industry-wide standard: licensing for AI training, development and uses. Current and emerging AI licensing practices From the wild west of the early AI landscape, licens - ing practices and deals have come a long way, with many AI companies and key creative industry players joining together in licensing arrangements that ben - efit both entities. As noted, various notable licensing deals have arisen from the aftermath of litigation, as parties have settled cases and embarked upon col - laborative ventures such as AI musical subscription services, which are poised to create revenue streams for artists and songwriters through training AI models exclusively on authorised, licensed music deriving from major music publishers’ catalogues. Outside of litigation, creative industries – recognising the emerging markets for aggregated training data – and AI developers cognisant of the legal risks in train - ing their models off of pirated data, have also entered into licensing agreements. Image licensing companies have, for example, entered multi-year deals with AI developers for image, video and music model train - ing, allowing access to licensed content. Other image companies have created synthetic content to provide custom datasets to build legally clean marketplaces for the AI industry, such as vAIsual, which in 2023 launched a dataset series comprised of videos with full-body biometrics and postures from models who signed releases for use of their biometric data. A pleth - ora of other companies have also recently partnered with AI developers through licensing deals, including within publishing, news media and film. See – eg,
Katie Duffy, A Complete List of Publishers and Their AI Licensing Deals , FutureWeek (4 September 2025). Agreements include multi-year deals whereby aggre - gated content such as news and editorial articles are supplied, even on a daily basis, to AI developers. Many existing AI licensing agreements pertain to text-and-data mining (TDM) licensing, allowing AI developers to use rights-holders’ content for training large language models. These agreements routinely include provisions accounting for display rights for AI models to summarise works (in the case of publish - ing agreements for news articles, for example), as well as imposing rules on data retention and deletion, usage reporting, attribution and indemnification for legal issues such as AI hallucinations. They also often grant the licensor access to the AI company’s tools. The specific terms of many AI licensing agreements, however, are strictly confidential. See AI Licensing for Creative Works, Copyright Alliance (organising ongoing list of major licensing agreements by “Copyright Owners,” AI Companies,” and “Organi - zation”) (last visited 26 January 2026). Still, various high-profile agreements signal the direc - tion in which other licensing arrangements between key industry players and AI developers may trend. Notably, in December 2025, Disney signed a licens - ing agreement with OpenAI granting the platform and its Sora AI video app access to over 200 characters. The Sora video tool and ChatGPT Images will, in turn, allow consumers to create short videos starting in early 2026, while Disney will use OpenAI technology on its own platforms, including Disney+, integrating AI into storytelling. Disney concurrently invested USD1 billion into OpenAI, representing one of the first Hol - lywood studios to strike such an arrangement in sup - port of an AI platform. In the music publishing arena, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music Entertain - ment entered into separate licensing agreements with AI music start-up Klay to train its models, in addition to the UMG and WMG arrangements with Udio. Other highlighted agreements include Microsoft and Harp - erCollins’ deal for licensing book content for train - ing, Shutterstock’s deals with various AI platforms to
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