Anthropic Pays AP in First-Ever Publisher Licensing Deal
By @sharedot · · 7 pages
- AI
- Anthropic
- Associated Press
- Content Licensing
Anthropic signed its first-ever content licensing deal with the AP, letting Claude cite AP's Election Night polling data.
Anthropic Signs First-Ever Publisher Deal With AP
On Election Night, November 3, users who asked Claude for the latest polling data received up-to-the-minute answers credited to the Associated Press — the result of a content and data licensing deal signed just before the midterms.
ADWEEK reported the agreement on November 4, citing two people familiar with the matter, and called it the first time Anthropic has paid a digital news publisher to license its content.
Neither side disclosed financial terms or how long the deal runs; Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and the AP did not comment on the record.
A Reversal of Anthropic's Fair-Use Strategy
The deal marks a dramatic shift for a company that had held out longer than every major rival. In August, digital media executives said Anthropic believed fair use covered its scraping of publisher content and that it had no plans for licensing deals, according to ADWEEK.
Over the same period, OpenAI signed more than a dozen agreements with publishers including Axel Springer, News Corp and The Atlantic, while Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Perplexity all struck deals with premium publishers.
Anthropic had signed none, no publisher had sued it, and publishers kept blocking its crawlers.
Why Election Night Exposed the Cost of Holding Out
Publishers have spent two years blocking AI crawlers to force licensing talks, a tactic RuntimeWire describes as a digital embargo. Faced with Claude being nearly useless as a real-time information source on one of the year's biggest search days, the deadline moved the company.
RuntimeWire notes that if one deadline moved Anthropic, sports, markets and breaking news can move it again, giving every publisher holding current data a reported precedent to cite.
The AP Is an Unusual but Ideal First Partner
ADWEEK explains the AP is an exceptional case: licensing and wire deals generate most of its revenue, so its business is already structured around such tie-ups.
It was also the first publisher with whom OpenAI and Google signed — the AP agreed in 2023 to let OpenAI license its archive, and on January 15, 2025, Google said the AP would supply a real-time feed for Gemini.
Its canonically non-partisan positioning, more a service like Getty Images for information than a standard publisher, makes it an ideal test partner for an AI firm trying licensing for the first time.
Stakes for the IPO and Publisher Stocks
The timing matters because Anthropic is still private: per 24/7 Wall St., its IPO filing, amended November 2, lists the shares for the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "ANT," with road show potentially starting no earlier than November 10.
Licensing fees and publisher lawsuits both weigh on margins — Anthropic agreed in September 2025 to pay about $1.5 billion to settle authors' claims — so IPO buyers will want to know whether the AP payment is a one-off or the start of a recurring expense.
The report does not say the deal covered race calls, election results or the AP archive, and News Corp's same-day earnings release, which named OpenAI and Meta as partners, made no mention of Anthropic.