As fears grow over artificial intelligence training on and using content, so do calls for the publishing industry to actively monetize AI. Publishers are entering the AI business themselves, and startups targeting the market for AI training data are emerging.
Overseas, a handful of large publishers have begun to succeed in AI licensing. The movement is most visible among academic publishers, as AI companies prefer specialized, vetted scholarly material for training.
According to a report on mid- to long-term strategies for promoting and protecting publications in the AI era, released on Sept. 29 by the Korean Publishers Society, the most prominent player in AI licensing is Wiley, the U.S. academic publisher. Wiley chose a subscription model rather than one-off sales of full texts, meaning AI companies must maintain their subscriptions to keep receiving the latest scholarly material through the publisher. Wiley has signed content licensing agreements with Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Perplexity and Mistral. Its cumulative AI-related revenue is reported to have passed $100 million (about 133.8 billion won) as of March this year.
HarperCollins, a major trade publisher, is also reported to have pursued a training agreement with Microsoft centered on nonfiction titles. Notably, HarperCollins confirmed participation with authors individually, respecting their right to choose. The agreement runs about three years, with a licensing fee of roughly $5,000 per book split 50-50 between the publisher and the author. The publisher also drew clear limits while permitting AI use: even under the agreement, it restricted how much of a book's text an AI company could reproduce. Another case worth noting is Germany's Axel Springer, a large media company spanning news and publishing, which signed an agreement with OpenAI in 2023 that included support from OpenAI's technology for its AI-based businesses.
Some large overseas publishers have also won substantial damages in litigation against AI companies. According to Vulture, the U.S. pop culture magazine, the settlement of damages in Bartz v. Anthropic means Bloomsbury, the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter series, is expected to receive more than $21 million (about 28.1 billion won) after its claims over 14,087 titles were recognized.
In South Korea, Mentat, an AI book licensing platform founded in 2025, is active in the market. Publishers sign rights agreements with Mentat, which then negotiates supply terms with AI companies and licenses the books for AI training. Mentat has agreements with about 90 publishers and has secured roughly 34,000 titles, which it has supplied or is in talks to supply to global AI companies and domestic tech firms. Its cumulative contract value is about 15 billion won. "In a shifting technological environment, the publishing industry can stay competitive only by identifying new demand and creating value that meets it," said Kwon Hyuk-gun, Mentat's chief data officer.