Nigeria, July 31 -- Africa remains conspicuously absent from the negotiation tables as Google, OpenAI and other tech giants expand content licensing deals to news publishers around the world. These deals, designed to pay media organisations for the use of their content in training large language models (LLMs), are reshaping the global media economy. But African publishers are watching from the sidelines, and the implications are deeply troubling.

Last year, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over unauthorised use of its content. Similarly, The Intercept and Raw Story have filed lawsuits for copyright infringement, claiming that their content was used without authorisation in the training of AI models.

At the same time, so...