A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has initiated a legal action against Anthropic, an AI company, in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press have alleged that Anthropic violated their copyright by utilizing their content to develop its large language AI model called Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has leveraged the commercial success of its AI models, expanded its range of services, and secured substantial funding without obtaining a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and initially 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 technological safeguards implemented to prevent content copying. The news outlets emphasized their role in producing a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content across various platforms and serving millions of readers.
Anthropic is accused of ‘scraping’ large volumes of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without consent to fuel its AI models. The news publishers claim that Anthropic continues to scrape content regularly in response to user queries.
In a separate legal action initiated in 2024, the same news organizations, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, a case that remains unresolved. Similar instances have been reported internationally, such as The New York Times suing OpenAI for unauthorized use of its copyrighted material, with the Justice Department recently ruling in favor of the tech company.