Anthropic is the only major AI firm that has never licensed content from a premium digital publisher and also the only one no publisher has taken to court, according to Mark Stenberg at Adweek. OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Perplexity have all signed some form of licensing deal, and all of them have drawn suits, with The New York Times and Ziff Davis going after OpenAI, News Corp and CNN after Perplexity, Condé Nast after Cohere, and Penske Media after Google. Four media executives and a legal expert put the anomaly down to timing and branding. One publisher CEO told Stenberg the question of why nobody has sued Anthropic is the key one in the field right now. Anthropic hasn’t escaped court altogether, and paid $1.5B in July to settle a class action from book authors.
