Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press sue Anthropic for copyright infringement in Ontario

A coalition of news publishers that includes Canada’s largest newspapers is suing Anthropic in an Ontario court. The plaintiffs are Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press. According to The Canadian Press, which reported the case on October 19, the lawsuit was filed on October 6 and first reported by the news site Cartt.ca. The publishers allege that Anthropic infringed their copyright by using their content to develop its large language model Claude.

The statement of claim says Anthropic deliberately scrapes enormous amounts of text from the internet and from the plaintiffs’ websites, then uses that content without authorization to develop its models. It also alleges that Anthropic keeps scraping content on an ongoing basis in response to user prompts. The publishers say Anthropic breached their websites’ terms of service and circumvented technological protection measures meant to restrict copying. The claim says Anthropic raised significant capital without obtaining a valid license from any of them and was “substantially and unjustly enriched.”

The allegations have not been proven in court. The Canadian Press said Anthropic had not responded to a request for comment, and the reports don’t state the damages sought. The same companies, alongside CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in Ontario in 2024, and that case has yet to be settled. News publishers have been pushing the federal government to take a stand on how AI systems use copyrighted content after its national AI strategy failed to address the issue.