A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken legal action against Anthropic, an AI company, in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press allege that Anthropic violated their copyright by using their content to develop its large language AI model, Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models and secured substantial funding without obtaining a proper license from any of the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, initiated on October 6 and first reported by Cartt.ca, highlights that Anthropic has not responded to requests for comment, and the allegations remain unproven in court.
The claim asserts that Anthropic violated the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassed their technological protection measures to prevent content copying. The news outlets, which produce a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content with millions of readers collectively, accuse Anthropic of “scraping” vast amounts of text data from the internet and their websites without authorization.
The lawsuit contends that Anthropic uses this content to develop its AI models and continues to scrape content in response to user requests, all without consent. Despite concerns raised by various content creators and legal actions, including a previous lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, Anthropic is accused of persisting in its unlawful behavior.
Similar legal battles have unfolded internationally, with news publishers overseas also suing tech companies for using their articles to train AI systems. Notably, The New York Times took legal action against OpenAI for copyright infringement, with recent developments showing the Justice Department siding with the tech company in a related case.