Publishers are quietly cutting six-figure AI licensing deals on Snowflake, as the data giant positions itself as matchmaker-in-chief between locked-down news content and enterprises keen to plug reliable publisher content into their own internal AI tools via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
For publishers, the cloud platform’s Cortex Knowledge Extensions act as a monetized RAG pipe: a way to let enterprises query their paywalled or proprietary content inside Snowflake’s AI environment without exposing raw feeds, losing control, or getting scraped for model training.
The Washington Post, Associated Press (AP), People Inc., and USA Today Network are among the 17 publishers that have signed on to use it. Other publishers, including the Financial Times and The Economist, have previously spoken to Digiday of their interest in the RAG royalties that can come from opening their archives to private LLMs. Meanwhile, AP’s CRO Kristin Heitmann previously told Digiday the Snowflake exchange offers “unlimited use cases” covering finance companies along with companies monitoring supply chains, managing crisis and operations, and environmental and regulatory awareness.
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