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.
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.
This positioning informs its data requirements, according to three of the executives, who were told in negotiations that the company has only ever considered paying for unique, hard-to-access data sets, rather than journalism produced by news or mainstream publishers.
“[Anthropic] more or less told me that, unless I had access to half a million medical journal articles in Dutch, that they were not interested,” said a second media executive, who has negotiated with the company on behalf of two separate publishers.
A legal mystery
Despite its exceptional refusal to sign licensing deals, Anthropic is nearly alone in avoiding any legal blowback. (Elon Musk’s xAI also has no licensing deals or related legal suits.)
Among other factors, the company has fortunate timing to thank for its lack of litigation, according to all five of the people.
OpenAI was the first major entrant in the AI space, and as such, it has borne the brunt of related legal action, including an ongoing lawsuit from The New York Times.
“First through the wall gets bloody,” said a third media executive, who has engaged in conversations with the firm.
These lawsuits are also prohibitively expensive for the average news operation; The Times has spent nearly $30 million on its court case against OpenAI, according to its quarterly reports. This price tag reduces the number of media companies that can afford to wage these protracted contests down to a select few.
As a result, given the litigation pending against firms like OpenAI and others, other media firms have likely held off on suing Anthropic simply because such a suit would prove costly and would likely be redundant, according to three of the executives.
On a more qualitative basis, Anthropic has also cultivated a brand reputation that makes it less inviting of legal action, according to two of the executives.
The founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has called attention to the potential dangers of AI, including its ability to eliminate jobs and threaten national security. This public handwringing contrasts with the messaging of OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, who has, at times, callously framed AI and its downstream effects as unavoidable.
“Some of the public relations that [Anthropic] has done on themselves is very good,” said the fourth media executive. “They have positioned themselves as the good actors in the space, as doing no harm.”
The narratives developed around the two firms influence the way in which consumers and businesses interact with them.
In August, for instance, an influencer retreat that OpenAI orchestrated in upstate New York was widely criticized online. Anthropic, however, has hosted several similar influencer activations, including a weeklong merchandise pop-up and an exclusive influencer dinner at a restaurant in New York’s West Village, that generated long lines and positive reception.
Taken together, these factors help explain how Anthropic has found itself in such an exceptional position. How long that good fortune will last is another question entirely.
Talking Heds
i-D CEO PSA (EXCLUSIVE): The trendsetting fashion and culture publisher i-D will name chief commercial officer Michiel Steur as its first chief executive officer on Thursday, ADWEEK can exclusively report. The editorial brand, which first launched in 1980 and was sold, in 2023, by Vice Media to Karlie Kloss’ media imprint Bedford Media, aims to enter a new era under the stewardship of the former supermodel and her venture capitalist husband Josh Kushner. The full story is coming Thursday, but I included an excerpt from my conversation with Steur below.
**Front Office Apps (EXCLUSIVE): **The business of sports media outlet Front Office Sports launched its first mobile app on Tuesday, ADWEEK exclusively reported. The new product not only unlocks a new swath of advertising inventory for the outlet—it also marks its full transformation from a newsletter-based publisher into a multichannel platform. FOS, which is also launching its first linear television program in September, now encompasses newsletters, streaming video, a mobile app, events, and, of course, its website. The only thing missing is a consumer subscription product, which I have to imagine is coming shortly.
Expanding ReachTV (EXCLUSIVE): The airport entertainment brand, whose newly appointed CEO Rachel Jacobson I spoke with in July, has named several new executives to its leadership team as it plots its expansion. On Thursday, the company will reveal that it has brought aboard Jodi Porter as its chief revenue officer, who joins from TikTok, as well as head of production Larry Berger, who joins from USA Today Inc. ReachTV is a prime example of a budding hypothesis of mine, which is that as in-person experiences continue to rise in value, the advertising that caters to those experiences—think movie theaters, out-of-home displays, airports, and other third-spaces—will see a related increase in value.
News Works: In the ongoing effort to persuade brands to advertise alongside news content, the most convincing argument is not a call to civic duty but a return on investment. A new study from DoubleVerify seeks to speak their language. In an analysis of campaign performance across dozens of news websites, including The AP, Guardian, and The Telegraph, advertising on these sites resulted in 18% lower cost per 1,000 impressions; 38% lower cost per click; and 21% lower cost for viewable impressions.
Creator Cracks: In my cover story on creators becoming media companies, I cautioned that evolving from creator into mogul can be rife with growing pains. In two recent investigations, Bloomberg Media’s Ashley Carman has detailed exactly what these challenges look like. Earlier this month, Carman scooped that Call Her Daddy founder Alex Cooper was shutting down her beverage company, just days after announcing a capital raise valuing the company at $500 million. And on Wednesday, Carman detailed the implosion at Audiochuck, the hit true crime podcast company founded by Ashley Flowers, which has seen an exodus of executive leadership amid claims of burnout and mismanagement. No matter how you go about it, scaling creative endeavors built around individual talent is always going to require a minor miracle.
Quote/Unquote
Michiel Steur is the new chief executive officer of i-D, the trendsetting fashion and culture brand founded in 1980. Steur, who is currently the chief commercial officer of the publisher, will officially assume the new role on Oct. 1, becoming its first CEO.
Under Steur, i-D will look to begin a new chapter, having been acquired from Vice Media in 2023 as the company navigated its bankruptcy filing. Under its new ownership, Karlie Kloss’ Bedford Media, i-D joins a growing portfolio of publishers, including Life, that aim to capitalize on the considerable resources and connections of the former supermodel and her husband, Josh Kushner, the venture capitalist and new co-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers.
This interview has been edited.
**Mark Stenberg: i-D has been around for more than four decades, yet you are its first CEO. Why create that role now? **
**Michiel Steur: **I joined in October 2024 as the chief commercial officer of i-D, as part of this new era. For the past two years, we’ve been focused on rebuilding the brand and its business. Now, we want to evolve i-D from a magazine into a media business and cultural platform. Because of the momentum we’ve seen, having dedicated leadership for the brand across the team made sense.
Mark: How do you hope to accomplish that evolution? How will i-D change?
Michiel: We remain committed to what i-D does best, which is to discover and champion new creative talent, but we are always focused on what is next. Commercially, we are expanding into new advertising categories, including automotive and technology. Editorially, we are leaning into the personalities of our editorial staff while also emphasizing our print product.
Mark: Print is a surprisingly hot topic among media companies nowadays. What does that business look like for i-D?
Michiel: Print is about 20% of overall revenue, and it’s growing. We are also using zines as the centerpiece of broader branded content partnerships, centering them around specific themes and then amplifying that content across digital and social platforms.
Mark: The media industry has had its fair share of headaches stem from the ownership of supposedly benevolent billionaires. How does being part of Bedford Media affect i-D?
**Michiel: **The main reason Bedford acquired i-D was to preserve an iconic media brand and to ensure that it continues to be the platform that champions emerging talent. One of the advantages of our ownership is that we have the ability to invest in that mission with a much longer-term perspective.
Pulled Quotes
**“The bottom has fallen out of the culture of generosity around recommendations. It has all become monetized.” **
Loyola University marketing professor Jenna Drenten, on affiliate links infiltrating group chats
READ MORE **“My friends are saying that there’s this hot chef on Instagram, and they think that she’s in our kitchen.” **
Southampton resident Dorothy Bandier, on her private chef becoming an Instagram influencer
READ MORE **“Nothing makes me feel more like a socialist than when I think about how billionaires flip these [sports franchises].” **
Substack author Derek Thompson, on the inequity of the professional sports franchise model
READ MORE “Hollywood has once again cheated death.”
Bloomberg Media’s Lucas Shaw, on the resurgence of movie theaters