Descriptions:
Parallel CEO Parag Agrawal — formerly CEO of Twitter — joins Bloomberg Technology to announce the launch of Index, a content marketplace designed to compensate data creators when AI agents use their content to perform real work. The core argument is that existing deals between large AI labs and publishers are flat-fee arrangements that lock content owners out of the growing value agents create, and that a better model requires dynamic attribution tied to actual agent output.
Index uses Shapley values — a concept from cooperative game theory — to calculate each content source’s marginal contribution to a given agent task. The mechanism has three key properties: higher-quality content earns more, content used in higher-value work earns more, and compensation scales as agents do more work overall. Agrawal says this creates a sustainable economy for web content rather than a one-time licensing transaction. Launch partners include premium publishers like The Atlantic and Fortune, data providers like PitchBook, ZoomInfo, and PR Newswire, and independent creators including Alix Steel and Azim Azhar.
The launch comes as enterprises increasingly deploy AI agents for knowledge work — legal research, financial analysis, scientific investigation — and as the question of who pays for the underlying data becomes commercially urgent. Index positions itself as infrastructure for that transition, open to content owners of any size and to agents built by any provider, not just major AI labs.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published May 19, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
