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 named Claude.
The statement of claim asserts that Anthropic has profited from its AI models’ commercial success, expanded its range of services, and secured substantial funding without obtaining proper licensing from any of the News Media Companies. This alleged action has allegedly unjustly enriched Anthropic at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The lawsuit, filed on October 6, was initially disclosed by the news outlet Cartt.ca. Anthropic has not yet commented on the matter, and the claims remain unproven in court.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic allegedly violated the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassed technological protection measures implemented to prevent content copying. The claim emphasizes that the news outlets are significant contributors to Canada’s journalism landscape, catering to millions of readers.
The news publishers accuse Anthropic of scraping vast amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without permission to fuel its AI models. They claim that Anthropic continues to scrape content regularly in response to user requests.
Despite concerns raised by various content creators and previous legal actions across different industries, Anthropic allegedly persists in its unauthorized activities, as stated in the claim.
Additionally, the same news companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is still ongoing. Similar lawsuits have been seen globally, such as The New York Times suing OpenAI for using its copyrighted material, with the Justice Department supporting the tech company in a recent case.