Anthropic struck its first content and data licensing deal with the Associated Press, signed just before the midterm elections, according to two people familiar with the matter. The arrangement meant that users who opened Claude on Election Night and asked for the latest polling data received up-to-the-minute information provided by and attributed to the AP. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and the AP did not provide a comment on the record; the financial specifics of the arrangement, as well as other critical details such as its timeframe, were not disclosed by either party. The deal marks a dramatic evolution in strategy for Anthropic, as the artificial intelligence firm behind Claude had not, until Tuesday, struck a content licensing deal with any digital publisher, unlike OpenAI, which has negotiated more than a dozen content licensing deals with major publishers including Axel Springer, News Corp., and The Atlantic. Digital media executives had told the reporter that the company genuinely believes its scraping and use of publisher content is legally permissible under the concept of fair use. The likely answer for the change is that an information index without access to up-to-date data is dramatically limited in its utility, and without deals with major news publishers Anthropic lacked access to credible, timely reporting, leaving it able to cite only what AI researcher Deana Burke calls the “unlocked web.”