Anthropic signs its first news licensing deal, with the Associated Press, Adweek reports
The agreement let Claude show live AP election results with attribution on midterm night. Anthropic had previously argued that scraping news was fair use.
Anthropic has signed its first licensing deal with a news publisher, the Associated Press, according to Adweek, citing two people familiar with the matter, The Decoder reports. The deal let Claude show live AP election results, with source attribution, on the night of the US midterm elections. Financial terms and the length of the agreement were not disclosed. This is a change in strategy. Until now, Anthropic had rejected such partnerships, arguing that scraping publisher content is legally allowed 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, Claude was severely limited on time-sensitive questions. According to the report, publishers had been deliberately blocking Anthropic's crawlers to push the company to negotiate. AP was also the first licensing partner for both Google and OpenAI. The deal comes as Anthropic gets close to its public listing. It could also affect how other publishers approach talks with Anthropic, since the company had until now kept away from paid content agreements.