A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken 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 without obtaining proper licenses from the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and initially reported by Cartt.ca, highlights the allegations that Anthropic has not obtained permission to use the news publishers’ content, leading to unjust enrichment for Anthropic at the expense of the News Media Companies.
According to the claim, Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed technological protection measures intended to prevent the copying of their content. The news outlets argue that they are significant contributors to Canada’s journalistic content and collectively reach millions of readers.
The claim further states that Anthropic “scrapes” substantial amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without consent to feed into its AI models. Anthropic is accused of ongoing unauthorized scraping in response to user requests.
The statement of claim also points out that despite objections from various content creators in different industries and previous legal actions, Anthropic has not taken steps to halt its unlawful practices. Additionally, the same news companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, had filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which remains unresolved.
Similar legal battles between news publishers and tech companies have occurred internationally. For instance, The New York Times sued OpenAI for using its copyrighted material in training AI systems, and the Justice Department recently sided with the tech company in a similar copyright dispute.
Overall, the legal action against Anthropic underscores the ongoing challenges faced by news publishers in protecting their intellectual property and seeking fair compensation for the use of their content in AI development.