Can a company license its SOPs for AI training?
Yes, if the company owns the procedures and can keep out what belongs to clients, vendors or individual employees. Standard operating procedures, work instructions, runbooks, playbooks and checklists are the written rules of how your business works: how a billing dispute is handled, how a failed release is rolled back, how a new client is onboarded, who signs off and what happens when a step goes wrong. Most companies wrote them for training, audits or compliance and never counted them as an asset. Much of a company's data already lives in third-party software. Licensing it means re-licensing what already exists, and getting paid for it rather than giving it away for free.
Where do SOPs and process documentation usually live?
They live in tools your teams already use: a wiki such as Confluence, SharePoint or Notion, shared drives, a document control or quality management system, an IT service management tool for runbooks, a learning platform for training checklists. The terms of those tools generally leave the content with you. Atlassian's customer agreement, for example, says that as between the parties the customer owns all intellectual property and other rights in its Customer Data (Atlassian Customer Agreement, effective Oct 1 2026, s. 13). So licensing your procedures means re-licensing what you already hold, and for procedures that already exist there is nothing new to write or collect.
Why do AI teams want SOPs and process documentation?
Because AI agents now have to follow a business's rules, not only answer questions, and SOPs are those rules written down. In June 2024, researchers behind τ-bench, a benchmark that gives an agent tools plus domain-specific policy guidelines and checks whether it completes tasks within them, found that even state-of-the-art function-calling agents such as GPT-4o succeeded on fewer than 50% of tasks and were inconsistent across repeated trials (τ-bench, arXiv 2406.12045). Their conclusion was that agents need to act consistently and follow rules reliably.
Teams building agents therefore want the real versions: the procedure, its exceptions, the escalation path and the judgment calls written into the margins. An AI training company's chief revenue officer told Business Insider that data showing how work is actually done is valuable because it gives critical context on how decisions are made (Business Insider, Oct 13 2026). In the same report, a marketing agency said it had licensed files including its checklists for onboarding clients, and had kept client-specific material out. A company that builds practice environments for AI agents told MIT Technology Review it looks for data archives reflecting a range of situations, from disagreements to tricky judgment calls (MIT Technology Review, Oct 13 2026).
What makes SOPs more valuable?
Procedures are worth more when they come with evidence of how they were used. In rough order of impact:
- Version history. Each revision, who approved it and why it changed shows how the process evolved and what went wrong before.
- Linked outcomes. Deviations, incidents, tickets and audit findings tied to the step involved. In some industries this trail is mandatory: US drug-manufacturing rules require that any deviation from written procedures be recorded and justified (21 CFR 211.100), and that unexplained discrepancies be investigated with a written record of the conclusions and follow-up (21 CFR 211.192).
- Coverage. A full library across departments, rather than a handful of showcase documents.
- Exceptions and escalations. Decision trees, "if this fails" branches and approval thresholds are the parts a generic procedure leaves out.
- Structure. Consistent templates, named owners, effective dates and numbered steps make procedures easy to parse and to match with the records of the work.
What is removed or de-identified before SOPs are shared?
We de-identify the data before it goes to buyers, and anything you choose to leave out stays out of scope. Owners of procedure libraries commonly leave out:
- approval blocks, signatures and training sign-off records that name employees;
- procedures written for, or supplied by, a specific client;
- security runbooks that contain credentials, access steps or internal system names;
- sections copied from a vendor's manual or a paid standard;
- HR and disciplinary procedures that describe individual cases.
What you control: you approve the scope before anything is shared. Raw data is deleted according to a schedule agreed with the partner. Your company's name stays confidential until the agreement is fully signed, and a completely anonymous partnership is also possible. Your company can keep ownership of its data. This is agreed case by case.
What rights and consent do SOPs need?
Mostly ownership and confidentiality, because procedures are written by people and often describe other companies' work. The gates that come up most:
- Who wrote them. In the US, a work an employee prepares within the scope of employment is a work made for hire, and the employer owns the copyright unless both sides agreed otherwise in writing (17 U.S.C. §101; §201(b)). UK law makes the employer the first owner of work an employee creates in the course of employment, subject to any agreement to the contrary (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, s. 11(2)). Procedures written by consultants differ: a commissioned work counts as made for hire only in nine listed categories and only with a signed written agreement, and an internal procedure rarely fits them (an "instructional text", for example, must be prepared for publication), so check the consulting contract for a written assignment of copyright.
- Trade secrets. US law names "methods, techniques, processes, procedures" among the information that can be a trade secret, provided the owner takes reasonable measures to keep it secret and it derives independent economic value from not being generally known (18 U.S.C. §1839(3)). License procedures under terms that keep them confidential, never by publishing them.
- Clients' procedures and NDAs. Procedures a client gave you are the client's, and procedures you wrote to perform a client contract may be too if the contract assigns them, so check the contract. Disclosing another's trade secret without consent, when you acquired it under a duty to keep it secret, is misappropriation under the same statute (18 U.S.C. §1839(5)), so leave them out unless the client agrees.
- Employees. Pseudonymised data, where names are replaced by codes that extra information could reverse, is still personal data under the UK GDPR; anonymous information is not (UK GDPR, recital 26). In the EU, the EDPB opened a consultation on guidelines for assessing anonymisation in July 2026 (EDPB Guidelines 02/2026).
- Vendors' and standards bodies' text. Passages copied from a supplier's manual or a purchased standard belong to their authors. Reference them; do not license them.
This page is general information, not legal advice.
What are SOPs worth?
There is no public price list for procedures, so the closest reference points are published figures for company knowledge in general, and they vary widely. Each is dated and labelled by market side; none is a fearofgod.ai price.
| Reference point | Market side | Figure and source |
|---|---|---|
| A buyer's programme for midsize companies' data | Published buyer offer, reported Oct 2026 | $100,000 to $2 million for access to anonymised data (Business Insider) |
| What drives a company-data valuation | Valuation method, reported Oct 2026 | head count, years in operation, volume of data and how the team used its tools, per one wind-down firm (MIT Technology Review) |
| Company data from wind-down sales | Market overview, Sep 2026 | no reliable market average exists for a failed company's data (Fortune) |
Treat any single figure with caution, and treat a short deadline on an offer as a reason to slow down. Partnerships typically range from $50K to $3M+.
How does licensing SOPs work with fearofgod.ai?
You license procedures your company already wrote, securely, and earn additional, long-term revenue from them. They already sit in your wiki, drives or document control system, so licensing them means re-licensing what exists.
The steps are the partnership form, a conversation, scope and terms, data preparation, then delivery and payment. Anything you want left out, such as a client's procedures, a security runbook or a department, stays out of the scope you approve. fearofgod.ai de-identifies the data before it goes to buyers.
A rough first description is enough: which teams' procedures you hold, roughly how many, how far back the version history goes, and whether deviations, incidents or tickets link to them. If you also hold wikis and reports or engineering documents, see internal documents and knowledge bases and technical documentation and specs. Talk to our team when you are ready.
Selling SOPs and process documentation to AI companies
A company that owns its SOPs and process documentation can sell them to AI companies by licensing them with fearofgod.ai, securely and for long-term revenue. Partnerships typically range from $50K to $3M+. Partners can be paid more than once, through renewals and repeat licences.