Anthropic signs first news licensing deal with AP

Anthropic has signed its first licensing agreement with a news publisher, partnering with the Associated Press (AP) shortly before the US midterm elections. Adweek reported the deal, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The agreement allowed Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to display live AP election results on election night and identify AP as the source. The financial terms and duration were not disclosed.

Anthropic had previously rejected similar arrangements, maintaining that collecting publisher content through web scraping was permitted under fair use. OpenAI already has more than a dozen comparable agreements, including partnerships with Axel Springer, News Corp., and The Atlantic. Without direct access to current publisher material, Claude had been limited in handling time-sensitive questions. Publishers had blocked Anthropic’s crawlers in an effort to bring the company into licensing negotiations. AP was also the first licensing partner for Google and OpenAI. Anthropic is reportedly nearing an initial public offering.