Anthropic has struck a content and data licensing deal with the Associated Press just before the United States midterm elections, according to Adweek, which cites two people familiar with the matter. It is the company's first paid licensing agreement with a digital news publisher.
What changes in Claude
On election night, Claude began showing up-to-the-minute results attributed to the Associated Press to users asking about the outcome. Until then, the assistant could not offer the same timeliness, as several publishers block Anthropic's crawlers.
Why Anthropic held out
Until now, Anthropic had argued that using publishers' content was permitted under fair use and had never paid for news content. OpenAI and Google already hold such deals, and the Associated Press was the first licensing partner for both. With the new agreement, the Associated Press becomes the only publisher with paid deals across the three leading generative AI platforms.
Adweek had already reported in August that Anthropic believed fair use covered the use of publishers' content. According to reporter Mark Stenberg, the crawler blocks imposed by publishers acted as a "digital embargo" that eventually brought the company to the negotiating table.
The IPO context
Neither Anthropic nor the Associated Press commented on the matter officially. The financial terms, duration and any scope beyond election coverage were not disclosed. Adweek notes that a single deal does not by itself signal a wholesale reversal of the company's strategy.
The move comes as Anthropic prepares to go public: the company filed for an IPO (Form S-1) with the SEC on October 26 and plans to list its shares on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The company filed an amendment to Form S-1 on November 2.
Image credit: Anthropic logo (image hosted by Intopic).
Sources:
- Adweek — Anthropic Strikes Its First Licensing Deal, With the AP, for Election Coverage
- The Decoder — Anthropic reverses course and pays for news content for the first time
- AI Weekly — Anthropic Licenses AP Election Data in First Publisher Deal
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, cross-checked against public posts and internet sources, and reviewed before publication. We recommend consulting the original sources to confirm the details.
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