Anthropic reverses course and pays for news content for the first time

Anthropic signed its first licensing deal with a news publisher just ahead of the US midterm elections. The partner is the Associated Press (AP), according to Adweek, citing two people familiar with the matter. The deal let the chatbot Claude show live AP election results on election night, complete with source attribution. Financial terms and the length of the agreement weren't disclosed.

Until now, Anthropic had rejected these kinds of partnerships, arguing that scraping publisher content is legally permissible under fair use. Rival OpenAI already has more than a dozen such deals, including with Axel Springer, News Corp., and The Atlantic. Without access to current publisher data, though, Claude was severely limited on time-sensitive queries. Publishers have been deliberately blocking Anthropic's crawlers to force the company to the negotiating table.

AP was also the first licensing partner for both Google and OpenAI. Anthropic is close to going public. Ad Ad

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.