A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken legal action against Anthropic, an AI company, in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press have accused Anthropic of violating their copyrights by using their content to develop its large language AI model named Claude.
The publishers claim that Anthropic has profited from its AI models’ success without obtaining proper licenses from any of the News Media Companies, resulting in unjust enrichment at their expense. The lawsuit, filed on October 6, was initially reported by Cartt.ca, with no response from Anthropic so far. The claims made have not yet been proven in court.
The statement of claim alleges that Anthropic breached the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed their technological safeguards to prevent content copying. The publishers argue that they play a significant role in generating Canada’s journalistic content, catering to millions of readers through print and digital platforms.
According to the claim, Anthropic accessed and copied substantial amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites, a practice known as “scraping,” to fuel its AI models without authorization. The publishers further assert that Anthropic continues to scrape content in response to user requests.
Additionally, the publishers, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is still ongoing. This legal action mirrors similar cases globally, such as The New York Times suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. Despite industry concerns and legal challenges, Anthropic has not taken steps to address its alleged unlawful behavior.