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 artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an Ontario court.
Canada's major news organizations, including Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press, have filed a copyright lawsuit against AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court. The news publishers claim that Anthropic utilized their content to build its large language AI model, Claude, without obtaining proper licensing.
The lawsuit, filed on October 6, argues that Anthropic has significantly benefited from the commercial success of its AI models, raising substantial capital without proper authorization. The statement of claim alleges that Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and circumvented their technological protections to copy their content.
The publishers contend that they generate a significant portion of Canada's journalistic content and have millions of readers. Anthropic allegedly "scrapes" content from their websites and uses it to develop its AI models, even responding to user prompts and continuing to scrape content on an ongoing basis. Despite concerns raised by various content creators and other lawsuits, Anthropic has failed to address its unlawful behavior.
The lawsuit follows a similar action brought against OpenAI by the same news companies in 2024, which is still pending. News publishers have been advocating for the federal government to take action on how AI systems utilize copyrighted content, as the national AI strategy did not address this issue.
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