The publisher embargo worked — Anthropic paid up

Runtime Wire confirms the Adweek scoop: the AP deal landed days after Anthropic filed its public S-1 on October 26, tying the about-face directly to IPO preparation.

Publishers have spent two years blocking AI crawlers to force licensing talks, and Anthropic held out longer than OpenAI, Google, and its other rivals — until election night exposed the cost of relying on whatever the open web left available.