A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, is taking 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 utilizing their content to create its large language AI model, Claude.
The statement of claim asserts that Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models without obtaining proper licenses from the News Media Companies. The lawsuit was filed on October 6 and was initially reported by Cartt.ca. Anthropic has not yet responded to requests for comment, and the claims have not been verified in court.
According to the complaint, Anthropic breached the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed their technological safeguards to prevent content copying. The news outlets, responsible for a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content and having millions of readers collectively, accuse Anthropic of “scraping” vast amounts of text data from the internet and their websites without permission.
The claim further alleges that Anthropic uses this content to develop its AI models without authorization, continuously scraping content in response to user requests. Despite objections from various content creators and legal actions in different industries, Anthropic allegedly continues its unauthorized behavior.
Moreover, the same news organizations, in conjunction with CBC/Radio-Canada, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is still ongoing. This legal action mirrors similar cases where news publishers globally have sued tech companies for using their articles to train AI systems. Notably, The New York Times took legal action against OpenAI for using its copyrighted material, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in a similar lawsuit.
