A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press allege that Anthropic violated their copyrights by utilizing their content to develop its large language AI model named Claude.
The statement of claim asserts that Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models, expanded its range of services, and secured substantial funding without acquiring a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. This has allegedly led to Anthropic being significantly enriched at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The legal action, initiated on October 6 and disclosed by Cartt.ca, awaits further proceedings as Anthropic has not officially responded to the allegations. The claims made in the lawsuit are yet to be proven in court.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed the technological safeguards implemented to prevent the replication of their content. The news outlets, collectively catering to millions of readers, are described as major contributors to Canada’s journalistic content landscape, spanning traditional print mediums to continuous digital news coverage.
The claim states that Anthropic illicitly “scrapes” substantial volumes of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites to feed its models and services without consent. It is alleged that Anthropic continues to extract content in response to user requests, using it to enhance its AI capabilities.
The statement of claim further highlights that despite objections from various content creators and legal actions in other industries, Anthropic persists in its unauthorized activities. Additionally, the same group of companies had previously filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is still ongoing.
Similar instances have occurred globally, with news publishers overseas also taking legal action against tech companies for utilizing their articles to train AI systems. Notable cases include The New York Times suing OpenAI for copyright infringement and the recent decision by the Justice Department to support the tech company in a similar dispute.