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After spending 2025 in regulatory limbo, TikTok is entering 2026 with a clearer ownership path in the U.S. Now, whether the new ownership structure is enough to satiate marketers (and continue to garner their ad dollars) is still an open question.

The deal, which was announced in late December and set to close on Jan. 22, according to Axios, ends the years-long saga of TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the company’s U.S. operation to domestic owners. Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX together will own 45% of the U.S. entity, 20% will be retained by ByteDance and nearly one-third of the company will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, per Axios.

If TikTok’s changing of hands is anything like Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of X (formerly Twitter), some marketers fear they’ll start the year with whiplash. 

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A number of tech companies signed their first AI content licensing deals with publishers in 2025. New players in this space means we will likely continue to see more agreements in 2026, as publishers look for ways to make money from their content being used to train AI systems.

Meta, Microsoft and Amazon all signed licensing deals with publishers in the last six months. 

Digiday tracked all the major AI content licensing deals between tech companies and publishers as a wrap in 2024. We’re doing it again for 2025. These agreements typically allow tech companies to use publishers’ content to train large language models (often including paywalled content). In exchange, publishers get attribution for their content surfaced in AI chatbots or search platforms, as well as access to technology that publishers can use to build AI-powered products and features.

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