This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.
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.
