Anthropic finally paid a publisher — the AP, for Claude's election data

Anthropic struck its first-ever content licensing deal with a digital publisher, the Associated Press, just before the midterm elections — Claude showed up-to-the-minute, AP-attributed polling data on election night, two people familiar with the matter told Adweek.

The holdout caved: until now Anthropic had refused every licensing discussion, arguing that scraping publisher content was fair use, while OpenAI signed more than a dozen publisher deals. Its crawlers are blocked by premium publishers, so Claude could only cite what one researcher calls the “unlocked web.”

Neither side disclosed price, duration, or scope, and Adweek cautions one deal does not prove a strategy reversal — but with its S-1 filed October 26 and an IPO weeks away, the company that said it would never pay for news just paid for it.