Anthropic Signs First News Licensing Deal With Associated Press

Anthropic has signed its first licensing deal with a news publisher, the Associated Press, just ahead of the US midterm elections, according to Adweek, which cited two people familiar with the matter. The agreement allows the chatbot Claude to show live AP election results on election night, with source attribution. Financial terms and the length of the agreement were not disclosed. Until now, Anthropic had rejected these kinds of partnerships and argued that scraping publisher content is legally permissible under fair use.

What the deal covers

The deal centers on live election results from the Associated Press. Claude can display those results on election night and attribute them to AP. The arrangement marks a change for Anthropic, which had previously said scraping publisher content is legally permissible under fair use.

Why the shift matters

Without access to current publisher data, Claude was severely limited on time-sensitive queries. Publishers have been deliberately blocking Anthropic's crawlers to force the company to the negotiating table. Rival OpenAI already has more than a dozen such deals, including with Axel Springer, News Corp., and The Atlantic. AP was also the first licensing partner for both Google and OpenAI.

Company context

Anthropic is close to going public. The AP agreement is its first licensing deal with a news publisher.

Sources: The Decoder