Anthropic struck its first paid licensing deal with a digital news publisher, agreeing with the Associated Press before the 3 November midterm elections to bring AP content and data to Claude, Adweek reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. Claude users asking about election results could receive current information attributed to the news agency.
Key points
- The AP agreement is Anthropic’s first paid content licence with a digital news publisher.
- Claude used AP information for election updates, with the news agency identified as the source.
- OpenAI has negotiated more than a dozen publisher licensing deals, including agreements with Axel Springer, News Corp. and The Atlantic.
- Neither party disclosed the agreement’s financial terms or duration.
AP data reaches Claude during election coverage
The arrangement gives Anthropic a source of current election information for Claude’s answers. Claude responses on election night supplied up-to-date AP information and identified the agency. Licensed AP election material appeared in Claude’s answers to users.
The AP earns the vast majority of its revenue from licensing and wire agreements with other publishers. It was also the first publisher to sign licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI. For Anthropic, the deal brings a news supplier with an established licensing business into a product that answers users’ questions directly.
News publishers had blocked Anthropic’s crawlers in an effort to bring AI answer services into licensing discussions. The agreement with the AP concerns election coverage that Claude could attribute to its supplier. It does not, on the reported terms, establish a broader publisher programme for Anthropic.
Anthropic changes course on publisher agreements
Digital media executives told Adweek in August that Anthropic believed its scraping and use of publishers’ content was permissible under fair use. At that point, the company had not entered formal publisher licensing partnerships or indicated plans to do so. The AP transaction changes that position in one identifiable respect: Anthropic has agreed to pay a digital news publisher for access to its material.
Anthropic was preparing to go public in a matter of weeks. The AP deal came during those preparations.
The agreement also sits alongside a separate dispute over publisher material. A group of Canadian news publishers is suing Anthropic, Press Gazette reported on 2 November. That case and the AP licence involve different publishers and different commercial decisions.
OpenAI’s publisher deals provide a comparison
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has negotiated more than a dozen content licences with major publishers, including Axel Springer, News Corp. and The Atlantic. Anthropic’s AP agreement is its first paid deal of that kind with a digital news publisher. The two companies therefore entered the election period with markedly different numbers of reported publisher arrangements.
Publisher agreements can carry different uses and prices. Press Gazette reported that Reach had signed a usage-based agreement for its content to appear in Amazon’s Nova model and Alexa assistant. It also reported a News Corp agreement worth up to $50m a year for Meta to use the publisher’s content in AI products. Neither figure is a reported price for Anthropic’s AP arrangement.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and the AP provided no comment on the record. Neither party disclosed the financial terms or duration of their agreement, Adweek reported.
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