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 using their content to develop its large language AI model named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from its AI models, expanded its services, and raised substantial capital without obtaining a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. This has led to Anthropic being unjustly enriched at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The lawsuit, initiated on Oct. 6 and first reported by Cartt.ca, highlights that Anthropic has not responded to requests for comments, and the allegations are yet to be proven in court.
The claim states that Anthropic violated the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassed technological protection measures meant to prevent the unauthorized copying of their content. The news outlets emphasize their role in producing a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content, catering to millions of readers.
Allegedly, Anthropic harvested large amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without authorization to fuel its AI models. It is also claimed that Anthropic continues to scrape content in response to user prompts.
A previous lawsuit was also filed by the same companies alongside CBC/Radio-Canada against OpenAI in 2024, which remains unresolved. This legal action mirrors similar cases where news publishers globally have taken tech companies to court for using their articles to train AI systems. For instance, The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in a related case.