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In response to the disruption posed to the internet by artificial intelligence firms, digital publishers have largely adopted a “ woo and sue ” strategy, striking content licensing deals with amenable parties and taking legal action against the others.
As a result, nearly every major artificial intelligence company, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Perplexity, has signed some form of content licensing agreement with a premium digital publisher, with one notable exception: Anthropic.
And yet, Anthropic is also one of the only major AI firms to have avoided any legal action at the hands of digital publishers.
The New York Times and Ziff Davis have sued OpenAI, News Corp. and CNN have sued Perplexity, Condé Nast has sued Cohere, and Penske Media has sued Google, among dozens of other suits. To be fair, Anthropic has not escaped legal action altogether: In July, it paid $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought against it by a group of book authors.
Why the discrepancy? The answer is a combination of fortunate timing and advantageous branding, according to interviews with four digital media executives and an industry legal expert.
“In this interesting space of law and AI companies, this is the most interesting, most important question,” said the chief executive of a premium digital publisher. “The biggest question is who is going to win. But this subsidiary question—why has nobody sued Anthropic—is the key one.”
The query is more than a rhetorical exercise. Anthropic and its archrival OpenAI are both hurtling toward the public markets, with valuations of $965 billion and $852 billion, respectively.
The answer engines the two companies have loosed on the open web have upended a digital marketplace that stood intact for nearly two decades, forcing digital publishers to scramble their commercial and editorial strategies in response.
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If Anthropic wins the AI race, its philosophy toward data capture and fair use could become the foundational dynamic of the open web. As such, the company and its relationship with publishers is of paramount importance to the future of digital media.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said the company does have data partnerships, but declined to share further specifics. The company has not announced any deals publicly, and the executives ADWEEK spoke with were unaware of any such deals among their peers.
“Claude is trained on a combination of publicly available data, data we create and data obtained through specific partnerships, based on product needs,” said an Anthropic spokesperson. “Our partnerships team is focused on data partnerships that meaningfully improves our products for our enterprise and developer customers.”
Unlike its peers, Anthropic has not negotiated content licensing agreements with major news publishers for a variety of reasons, accor…