A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken legal action against the AI company Anthropic 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 named Claude.

According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models and amassed substantial capital without obtaining proper licenses from any of the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and initially reported by Cartt.ca, highlights that the allegations are yet to be proven in court as Anthropic has not provided a comment.

The claim asserts that Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed the technological safeguards put in place to prevent content copying. The news outlets emphasize their role in producing a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content, catering to millions of readers.

The statement of claim alleges that Anthropic obtained content from the Plaintiffs’ Websites through ‘scraping’ techniques without authorization, using it to develop its AI models and responding to user prompts by continuously scraping content. In a separate lawsuit filed in 2024, the same news companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, took legal action against OpenAI, a case that remains unresolved.

Similar legal actions have been seen internationally, with news publishers suing tech companies for utilizing their articles to train AI systems. Notably, The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in a similar case.