Anthropic sued by major Canadian news publishers for copyright claims in Ontario court

A coalition of prominent Canadian news publishers, including Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press, have initiated a lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court. The News Media Companies allege that Anthropic infringed upon their copyright by utilizing their content to develop its large language AI model, Claude.

According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has capitalized on the commercial success of its AI models, raising significant capital while avoiding the necessary licensing agreements from these News Media Companies. Consequently, the News Media Companies claim to be unjustly enriched at the expense of these media organizations.

The lawsuit, filed on October 6, was initially reported by the news site Cartt.ca. Anthropic has not yet responded to a request for comment regarding the allegations. The statement of claim asserts that Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and circumvented the technological protection measures implemented by these websites to restrict unauthorized copying of their content.

The news outlets assert that Anthropic intentionally "scrapes" (accesses and copies) vast quantities of text data from the internet and their respective websites to feed into its AI models and services without proper authorization or consent.

The News Media Companies emphasize that they are the primary generators of a substantial portion of Canada's journalistic content, ranging from daily print broadsheets to round-the-clock digital news coverage. Collectively, these news outlets boast millions of readers. The claim states that Anthropic has been deliberately scraping content on an ongoing basis in response to user prompts.

Despite concerns raised by numerous content creators across various industries through different lawsuits and public criticism, the statement of claim alleges that Anthropic has failed to curb its unlawful behavior.

Notably, these same news publishers also filed a lawsuit alongside CBC/Radio-Canada against OpenAI in 2024, but that case is yet to be settled. News publishers have been advocating for the federal government to address the issue of how AI systems utilize copyrighted content, as the government's national AI strategy did not adequately tackle this concern. Global News has been requested to be added as a Preferred Source on Google to ensure a wider dissemination of these stories in search results.