What happened
Anthropic has signed its first licensing deal with a news publisher. The partner is the news agency Associated Press (AP), as The Decoder (DE) reports, citing an Adweek report based on two people familiar with the matter.
Thanks to the deal, the chatbot Claude could display current AP election results in real time on election night, with source attribution. Financial details and the term of the agreement were not disclosed.
Background
Until now, Anthropic had rejected such partnerships, as the company considers scraping publisher content to be permissible under the concept of "fair use," according to the report. According to the report, competitor OpenAI already has more than a dozen such deals, including with Axel Springer, News Corp. and The Atlantic.
According to the report, without access to current publisher data Claude was severely limited for time-critical queries. Publishers have been deliberately blocking Anthropic's crawlers to bring the company to the negotiating table. AP was also the first licensing partner for Google and OpenAI.
Assessment
If this approach catches on, it could set a precedent for paying for media content used in AI training. It remains open whether Anthropic will license further publishers and under what terms. For companies that use news data in AI applications or offer their own content, the key question is how such contracts regulate access, source attribution and compensation.
Sources
Editorially owned by Ideal Syka. Sources and method: Newsroom & method. Tips and corrections: ai@i6eal.de.
