Anthropic Strikes Its First Licensing Deal, With the AP, for Election Coverage - ADWEEK
By Google News AI ·
This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here. If, by chance, you opened Claude on Election Night and asked it for an update on the latest polling data, you would have been treated to a novel sight: up-the-minute information, provided by and attributed to the Associated Press. This new development was the result of a content and data licensing deal struck between the two organizations, which was struck just before the midterm elections, according to two people familiar with the matter. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and the AP did not provide a comment on the record. The financial specifics of the arrangement, as well as other critical details, such as its timeframe, were not disclosed by either party. Nonetheless, the deal marks a dramatic evolution in strategy for Anthropic, as the artificial intelligence firm behind Claude had not, until Tuesday, struck a content licensing deal with any digital publisher. In that regard, Claude differed dramatically from its primary competitor, ChatGPT, whose parent company OpenAI has negotiated more than a dozen content licensing deals with major publishers, including Axel Springer, News Corp., and The Atlantic, among others. In fact, the reluctance by Anthropic to engage in any kind of content licensing discussion had become such a subject of intrigue within the industry that I explored the situation in August, in one of my more literally titled pieces. At the time, digital media executives told me that the company genuinely believes that its scraping and use of publisher content is legally permissible under the concept of fair use. As such, it had not moved to enter into…
Originally published by Google News AI