News publishers launch copyright suit against AI company Anthropic in Ontario

A coalition of news publishers that includes Canada’s largest newspapers is suing the AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court.

Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press say Anthropic infringed on their copyright by using their content to develop its large language AI model Claude.

“Anthropic has capitalized on the commercial success of its AI models, building an expansive suite of services, and raised significant capital — all without obtaining a valid licence from any of the News Media Companies,” says the statement of claim.

“In doing so, Anthropic has been substantially and unjustly enriched to the detriment of the News Media Companies.”

The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 6, was first reported by the news site Cartt.ca. Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment. The allegations have not been proven in court.

The statement of claim says Anthropic breached the news media websites’ terms of service and circumvented technological protection measures they put in place to restrict copying of their content.

The claim says the news outlets “are responsible for generating a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content — from daily print broadsheets to round-the-clock digital news coverage,” and collectively have millions of readers.

“To obtain content for ingestion into its models and services, Anthropic deliberately ‘scrapes’ (i.e. accesses and copies) enormous amounts of text data from the internet and from the Plaintiffs’ Websites,” the claim says.

The news outlets say Anthropic then uses that content, without authorization or consent, to develop its AI models. It says Anthropic also scrapes content on an ongoing basis in response to user prompts.

“Notwithstanding concerns raised by several content creators across various industries, including through numerous other lawsuits and public criticism, Anthropic has done nothing to curtail its unlawful behaviour,” the statement of claim says.

The same companies also launched, alongside CBC/Radio-Canada, a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024. That case has yet to be settled.

News publishers have been pushing the federal government to take a stand on how AI systems use copyrighted content after the government’s national AI strategy failed to address the issue.