A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has initiated 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 develop its large language AI model, Claude.
The statement of claim asserts that Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models, expanded its range of services, and raised substantial funds without obtaining a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. This has resulted in Anthropic gaining significant benefits at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The lawsuit, filed on October 6, was initially reported by Cartt.ca. Anthropic has not yet provided a response to the allegations, and it should be noted that these claims have not been proven in court.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic violated the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassed the technological protections in place to prevent the copying of their content. The news outlets argue that they are responsible for producing a considerable portion of Canada’s journalistic content and have a collective readership numbering in the millions.
The claim further states that Anthropic “scrapes” substantial amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without permission to feed its models and services. Additionally, Anthropic continues to extract content in response to user requests without authorization.
The statement of claim highlights that despite concerns raised by various content creators in different sectors and numerous legal actions, Anthropic has not taken steps to rectify its unlawful actions. The same consortium of companies also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, in which the case remains unresolved.
Similar legal actions have been observed globally, with news publishers overseas suing tech companies for utilizing their articles to train AI systems. For instance, The New York Times took legal action against OpenAI for using the paper’s copyrighted material, with the Justice Department recently backing the tech company in a related case.
