On the eve of the U.S. midterm elections, AI company Anthropic made a key shift in strategic direction—it formally reached a content licensing agreement with the Associated Press. This is also the first time in its history that it has paid a news publisher for content rights.
From Refusing to Compromise to Sitting at the Negotiating Table
According to Adweek, citing people familiar with the matter, through this new partnership agreement, the Claude chatbot will be able to show and update the Associated Press's authoritative election results data in real time for users on the upcoming U.S. midterm election night, while clearly indicating the source of the information. However, the two sides have not publicly disclosed the specific financial terms or the duration of the agreement.
Looking back, Anthropic has always taken a fairly hardline stance on copyright issues. Previously, the company consistently refused to enter into such paid content licensing partnerships with major news publishers. Its core reasoning was that scraping publicly available publisher content through web crawlers fully complies with the "fair use" principle and is completely permitted under the law.
By contrast, its main competitor OpenAI has acted much more aggressively and much earlier, having already signed similar copyright licensing agreements with more than a dozen mainstream media organizations. Its partners include industry giants such as Axel Springer, News Corp, and The Atlantic.
Publishers Join Forces to "Cut Off the Supply" and Force a Turnaround
The direct reason that prompted Anthropic to change its attitude was the tough countermeasures taken by news organizations against it.
Because it had long been unable to obtain the latest first-hand content provided by news publishers through proper channels, Claude's ability to handle and answer highly time-sensitive trending questions was extremely limited. In order to force Anthropic to abandon its crude model of relying solely on web scraping and to take the initiative to sit at the business negotiating table, many mainstream overseas publishers had already taken action one after another, actively blocking the company's web crawlers in their website backends and completely cutting off its channel for scraping website content.
It is worth mentioning that the Associated Press, this time a partner, was also one of the media organizations that Google and OpenAI first reached content licensing agreements with. At this critical juncture as it approaches an IPO, Anthropic's choice to use a paid partnership to fully open up a compliant channel for acquiring timely news data will undoubtedly clear a major potential hidden risk for its future compliance-focused development.
