Canadian News Publishers Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Copyright Infringement
A coalition of major Canadian news organizations, including Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court. The plaintiffs allege their content was scraped without authorization to train the large language model Claude.
A coalition of major Canadian news publishers filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an Ontario court on Oct. 6. The legal action was first reported by the news site Cartt.ca.
The plaintiffs — Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press, which collectively reach millions of readers — allege that Anthropic used their content to develop its large language AI model, Claude, without obtaining a valid license. According to the statement of claim, Anthropic deliberately "scrapes" enormous amounts of text data from the internet and the plaintiffs' websites to ingest into its models and services.
The claim further asserts that Anthropic breached the news media websites' terms of service and circumvented technological protection measures designed to restrict copying. The allegations have not been proven in court, and Anthropic has not responded to requests for comment regarding the claims.
This filing follows a similar legal effort by the same group of publishers. In 2024, these companies, alongside CBC/Radio-Canada, launched a separate lawsuit against OpenAI. That case has yet to be settled.
Beyond the courtroom, news publishers are pushing the federal government to address how AI systems use copyrighted content. This pressure comes after the national AI strategy failed to do so.