Anthropic has a content licensing agreement with The Associated Press. This is the first time it has paid for content from a news publication.
The immediate use is the night of the US midterm elections: Claude will show the AP vote tallies in real time, with the source noted. The amount and term of the agreement were not disclosed by either party.
This is a big turn. Anthropic has always had a strong stance in the past, believing that crawling public web pages is fair use and is legally defensible, so it does not negotiate money with publishers.
My colleagues were already ahead. OpenAI has signed authorizations with more than a dozen media. Axel Springer, News Corporation, and The Atlantic Monthly are all on the list. ChatGPT has a ready-made source of manuscripts to answer current affairs questions.
Anthropic got the short end of the stick here. Many large overseas publishers directly blocked its crawlers in the background. As a result, Claude encountered time-sensitive hot questions, and the quality of his answers was obviously inferior.
If you don't give money, you will run out of food. This trick finally worked.
There are also things to pay attention to when choosing the Associated Press. It is one of the earliest licensing partners of Google and OpenAI. Signing it is equivalent to taking the least controversial model in the industry. In addition, Anthropic is on the way to the market, and copyright is such a minefield that it is cheaper to dismantle it early than to dismantle it later.
The next thing worth watching is whether there will be a second or third one. Only signing one company was more like a rescue for the election night scenario.