The AI data market, weekly · 26 Oct 2026
micro1 raised its published prices for company records, and Handshake's calculator now shows less
The two buyers that publish the most about company records moved their prices in opposite directions this week. A public company filed what one patient record sells for, and Getty Images' bankruptcy papers showed how small and uneven AI licensing still is for the largest image library.
What buyers publish now
- micro1 rewrote its data partnerships page: its tiers now read $100K to $500K, $500K to $2M and $2M+ (on 9 October they read $100k+, $500k+ and $1M+). It says it pays in full within 30 days of acceptance, typically $150K to over $2M, and it now licenses the trajectories of a company's own AI agents for $1M to $2M a year. MoreSource: micro1, data partnerships page
- Handshake AI's payout calculator changed engine. For a US company of 100 people with 10 years of records it now shows $257,000 to $513,000, against $383,083 to $896,969 on 11 October; for 20 people and 3 years it shows only "up to $100,000". Its page still advertises $100K to $4M+ payouts. MoreSource: Handshake AI, data partnerships calculator
- Mercor publishes 24 listings, one per kind of company, each with the range it pays: from $20,000 to $250,000 for a call centre to $100,000 to $1.5 million for a manufacturer, and up to $25,000 to $92,500 for whoever introduces one. MoreSource: Mercor, company referral listings
- Maxinsights raised a $30 million seed round to record first-person footage for robot training: over 5,000 contractors in six countries wear cameras through their daily tasks, and it has recorded over 2 million hours. MoreSource: John Koetsier (Forbes contributor), 22 October
What it sold for
- Tempus AI's 8-K prices a licence of de-identified neurology patient records to Pathos AI at $100 per delivered record: 500,000 records over five years, up to $55 million, exclusive only for a window after each delivery. With Bristol Myers Squibb's oncology licence ($137.5 million fixed to 2031) the two total $192.5 million. MoreSource: Tempus AI, SEC Form 8-K, 23 October
- Disney's $20 million stalking-horse bid in Character.AI's Chapter 11 buys a non-exclusive perpetual licence of some of its intellectual property, not the company: the app, its user data and its chat logs stay in the estate, and the bid is open to higher offers. MoreSource: Character Technologies, press release
- A court order in the authors' case against Meta disclosed that Fox licenses multimedia content to Meta for AI training. The fee stays sealed: the order calls it highly competitively sensitive and says Fox is negotiating other licences. MoreSource: Kadrey v. Meta, discovery order of 19 October
- ServiceNow's researchers say each of the 1,150 tasks Turing built for their EnterpriseOps-Gym benchmark cost about $100, scenario design, verification and quality checks included: one of the few per-task prices a buyer of made-to-order agent tasks has published. MoreSource: ServiceNow Research, EnterpriseOps-Gym paper
Prices
- Ten published offers per code repository now give a median of about $2,060 (middle half $1,350 to $5,870). MoreSource: AIData.Broker market rates, from the buyers' own pages
- Stockfilm raised its lowest AI training price from $0.95 a clip to $3.00 a clip in nine days, with $10 a clip for restored 4K masters and a $10,000 minimum order. MoreSource: Stockfilm, AI training licences
- What stock contributors receive for AI training keeps falling: one contributor's Adobe Firefly payment was $160 on 4,686 images in September 2024 and $53 on 4,927 images in September 2026. MoreSource: Alexandre Rotenberg, earnings reports
Courts and filings
- Getty Images filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 on 21 October. Its restructuring deck puts AI data licensing at about 2.6% of revenue in 2024, 4.4% in 2025 and 3.4% in the twelve months to June 2026, and the plan keeps every licence in force with the company that signed it. MoreSource: Getty Images Holdings, SEC Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2
- Reservoir Media sued Anthropic over 853 songs and Suno over 1,050, seeking up to $150,000 a work. The Suno complaint cites Suno's own deals with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe as proof that a market to license music for training exists. MoreSource: Reservoir Media v. Suno, complaint
- In the music publishers' lyrics case, Judge Eumi Lee heard Anthropic's fair use motion on 21 October and did not rule. Anthropic's economist argues that no market to license training data for general-purpose models exists or is likely to form. MoreSource: Concord v. Anthropic, Anthropic's motion (Doc. 693)