3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Feb 11, 2026 01:20 PM IST Amazon is reportedly exploring plans to launch a new content marketplace that would allow publishers to directly licence their material to AI companies.
The e-commerce giant met with a few publishing executives and spoke to them about its plans to develop a content licensing hub for training AI models, according to a report by The Information published on Monday, February 9. Amazon further “circulated slides that mention a content marketplace” ahead of an AWS conference for publishers held on Tuesday, February 10.
Amazon’s purported move comes amid a long-running stand-off between publishers and big tech companies which has only intensified with the rise of generative AI. The current AI boom has been largely fueled by large language models (LLMs) that have been trained and developed by ingesting vast amounts of training data scraped from all corners of the internet, including publishers’ websites, without authorisation.
In response, publishers such as The New York Times have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against tech companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI. In India, publishers — members of the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), including The Indian Express, among others — have mounted a legal challenge against OpenAI over the “unlawful utilisation of copyrighted material”.
New regulatory strategies to address the issue have also been proposed. In India, a government-constituted committee led by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) proposed a new framework last year that would require all AI companies to pay royalties to content creators for using copyrighted work under a mandatory blanket licence.
For tech companies, a marketplace for licensed content could serve as a reliable, legally compliant source of AI training data at a time when copyright infringement lawsuits and concerns about unauthorised scraping continue to mount. Publishers, on the other hand, may view the marketplace as a “more sustainable business [than current, more limited licensing partnerships] that will scale up revenue,” as per the report.
“Amazon has built long-lasting, innovative relationships with publishers across many areas of our business, including AWS, Retail, Advertising, AGI, and Alexa. We are always innovating together to best serve our customers, but we have nothing specific to share on this subject at this time,” an Amazon spokesperson was quoted as saying by TechCrunch.Story continues below this ad
Amazon is not the only tech giant to pursue such a marketplace. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced its own content licensing hub called Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) that lets AI developers pay publishers and train their models on ‘premium content’ under licensing terms set by the publishers themselves.
PCM will also provide publishers with insights on training data usage to help them understand the value of such content and accordingly set prices as well as licensing terms. The platform will be voluntary and open to all types of publishers, as per the company. Microsoft also emphasised that publishers will retain ownership of their content along with editorial independence.
