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.”
An ideological line
Unlike its peers, Anthropic has not negotiated content licensing agreements with major news publishers for a variety of reasons, according to multiple publishers.
Primarily, the company believes that its scraping and use of publisher content is legally permissible under the concept of fair use, according to all five sources. As such, the company has not moved to enter into any such partnerships, nor has it indicated any plans to do so in the future.
While Anthropic has made its position clear, the firm does maintain an open line of communication with leading publishers in the digital media ecosystem. It named a vice president of product partnerships, Tom Turvey, who joined in February 2024, to manage key relationships.
While conversations with Turvey and his team are typically courteous, the company makes it clear that they are dead ends, according to three of the media executives.
“[Turvey]’s job is to … pick up the phone twice a day and say no,” said the first media executive.
Turvey did not respond to a request for comment.
Additionally, Anthropic executives believe, given the gravity of the technology that they are building, that it is vital that they develop AI before anyone else does, according to the media executive.
In February, for instance, the company revised its Responsible Scaling Policy, an internal framework it developed for building AI safely, to enable it to move more quickly to keep pace with its competitors, according to Time.
“We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments … if competitors are blazing ahead,” its chief science officer, Jared Kaplan, told the outlet.
The decision reflects the importance the company has placed on developing its technology rapidly, revising even its own safety guardrails to prioritize expediency. In doing so, it demonstrates a willingness to reconsider any constraint, such as content licensing, that it believes could interfere with its ability to keep pace with its competitors.
Finally, especially compared to OpenAI, Anthropic functions as more of an enterprise product, catering to the needs of companies and professionals more than consumers. In March, the company was capturing 73% of all spending among companies buying AI tools for the first time, up from around 50% in January, according to Axios.
