Neither publishers nor platform executives are eager to restart the bitter coastal wars of the last decade. And they’re bringing none of the utopianism of the early internet. Publishers are determined not to repeat what many see as the mistakes of the social media era, in which they gave away their content for free. And tech executives are eager to avoid new allegations that they’re destroying democracy and journalism — and the attendant congressional hearings.

And in conversations with leading figures on both sides of the argument, the outlines of a settlement in which AI companies pay for training data are becoming clear — with one large glitch.

Tech companies appear to hope that they can placate publishers with, perhaps, eight figures worth of payouts, as the Facebook News Initiative did when it doled out payments annually between 2019 and 2022, fees reportedly exceeding $20 million for the Times, $15 million for the Washington Post, and $10 million for the Wall Street Journal.

Publishers believe the numbers ought to be much bigger this time around. If these breakthrough language models rely on their inputs, they argue, the share of the value they collect should be commensurate — and should run into the billions of dollars across the industry.

Levin, other publishers and their counterparts at Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants declined to quote numbers, or to discuss the coalition they’re forming.

But the publishers, led by Diller himself, are also threatening to try their luck in court, where complex questions about how copyright law applies to both the inputs to AI training and the outputs of AI models remain largely untested. Publishers are watching with particular interest to a Delaware lawsuit over an artificial intelligence company’s copying of legal texts from Westlaw.

Payments on the scale the publishers expect would mark a dramatic change for companies like Google, which have built high-margin business in large part because they — unlike media companies from Netflix to Comcast — don’t pay for content.

Unless the publishers lower their expectations, or the tech companies adjust their fundamental sense of what it is to be a platform, this high stakes conflict is likely to escalate.