A group of news organizations, including major newspapers in Canada, has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, an AI company, in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press claim that Anthropic violated their copyright by using their content in developing its large language AI model, Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has benefited financially from its AI models without obtaining a valid license from the news media companies. The lawsuit, initiated on October 6 and first reported by Cartt.ca, alleges that Anthropic has gained unjust enrichment at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The claim asserts that Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed their technological protection measures to prevent content copying. The news outlets, which produce a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content, state that Anthropic scraped vast amounts of text data from the internet and their websites without consent to fuel its AI models.
Despite concerns raised by various content creators and lawsuits in other industries, Anthropic allegedly continued its unauthorized behavior. Additionally, the same news organizations, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, are also involved in a separate lawsuit against OpenAI, which remains unresolved since its filing in 2024.
Similar cases have occurred globally, with news publishers suing tech firms for using their content to train AI systems. For instance, The New York Times took legal action against OpenAI for the use of its copyrighted material, a case in which the Justice Department recently sided with the tech company.