A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, has initiated a legal action 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.
The claim states that Anthropic has benefited commercially from its AI models, offering a range of services and securing substantial funding, all without obtaining a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. This has allegedly led to Anthropic being enriched unjustly at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and first disclosed by Cartt.ca, awaits further legal proceedings as Anthropic has not yet responded to the allegations. The claim accuses Anthropic of breaching the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassing protective measures intended to prevent content copying.
According to the claim, the news outlets are integral to producing a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content, catering to millions of readers through print and digital formats. Anthropic is accused of “scraping” vast amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without authorization to fuel its AI models, which also respond to user requests by continually scraping content.
Despite industry concerns and legal actions by other content creators, Anthropic allegedly continues its infringing activities unabated. Additionally, in a separate lawsuit filed in 2024, the same news organizations, together with CBC/Radio-Canada, are pursuing legal action against OpenAI, which remains unresolved.
Similar disputes have arisen globally, with news publishers in other countries also taking legal action against tech companies for using their articles to train AI systems. Notably, The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, an issue on which the Justice Department recently sided with the tech company.
