A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, an AI company, in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press allege that Anthropic violated their copyright by utilizing their content to create its large language AI model named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models, expanded its range of services, and raised substantial capital without obtaining a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. This has resulted in Anthropic being unjustly enriched at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The lawsuit, initiated on October 6 and initially reported by Cartt.ca, highlights that Anthropic has not responded to requests for comments on the allegations, which are yet to be proven in court. The statement of claim asserts that Anthropic breached the terms of service of news media websites and bypassed technological protection measures implemented to prevent content copying.
The claim emphasizes that the news outlets play a crucial role in generating a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content and collectively reach millions of readers. It alleges that Anthropic extracts large volumes of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without authorization to train its AI models, continuously scraping content in response to user demands.
Despite concerns raised by various content creators and legal actions taken by other industries, Anthropic has allegedly continued its unauthorized practices. Additionally, the same news companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, are also involved in a separate lawsuit against OpenAI, which remains unresolved since 2024.
Similar lawsuits have been observed globally, with news publishers overseas taking legal action against tech firms for utilizing their articles to train AI systems. For instance, The New York Times sued OpenAI over copyright infringement, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in a related case.