Story Protocol and OpenLedger Launch New Standard for Rights-Cleared AI Training and Automatic Creator Payments

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As legal scrutiny around AI training data intensifies and regulators demand greater transparency into how artificial intelligence models are built, Story Protocol and OpenLedger today announced the launch of a new joint standard designed to make intellectual property AI-ready by default legally, transparently, and with automatic creator compensation built in.

The new standard allows AI systems to train on licensed intellectual property while cryptographically proving how that IP is used, enforcing licensing terms at runtime, and automatically distributing royalties to rights holders when their work contributes to AI behavior or outputs.

Until now, once creative work entered AI training pipelines, it effectively became untraceable. Creators had limited visibility into how their work was used, enterprises lacked reliable auditability, and AI developers operated in an expanding legal gray zone. Story Protocol and OpenLedger aim to address this by embedding rights, attribution, and payments directly into AI infrastructure itself.

Under the standard, Story Protocol serves as the canonical registry for intellectual property, defining ownership, licensing terms, derivative permissions, and economic rights in a machine-readable format. OpenLedger functions as the AI execution and verification layer, enforcing those licenses during both training and inference, cryptographically verifying IP usage, and automatically routing payments when licensed content contributes to model behavior or AI-generated derivatives.

Training data, models, and outputs can be traced end-to-end, with auditable usage logs and payments that settle automatically on-chain.

The standard is designed to support a broad range of AI use cases, including large-scale model training, autonomous agents, and AI-generated content platforms. By making rights enforcement native to AI workflows, the framework gives enterprises confidence to deploy AI at scale.

"AI cannot scale on legal ambiguity," said Ram, Core Contributor at OpenLedger. "If intelligence is becoming economic infrastructure, then intellectual property must be programmable, enforceable, and monetized by default. Story defines what IP can be used. OpenLedger defines how it's used in AI."

Together, Story Protocol and OpenLedger are laying the groundwork for a more transparent and sustainable AI economy.

About OpenLedger

OpenLedger is an AI-native blockchain designed to make data, models, and autonomous agents verifiable, ownable, and economically accountable.

About Story Protocol

Story Protocol is an open protocol for registering, licensing, and monetizing intellectual property, making IP programmable and machine-readable for AI and digital media ecosystems.