Copyright: Canada’s major newspaper publishers sue Anthropic
Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press accuse the Claude developer of using their content for AI models without permission. The allegations are unproven.
Symbolic image · Photo: Charles Hoffman / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped and resized)
A coalition of news publishers that includes Canada’s largest newspapers has sued AI company Anthropic in a court in the province of Ontario. The plaintiffs include Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and the news agency The Canadian Press. The claim was filed on 6 October; news site Cartt.ca first reported it.
The publishers accuse the developer of the Claude models of copyright infringement, unjust enrichment, breaching the terms of service of their websites and circumventing technological protection measures. According to the statement of claim, Anthropic copies text from the internet and from the publishers’ sites to train its models and also keeps accessing it in response to user prompts – without consent or a licence.
Anthropic did not initially respond to a request for comment. The allegations have not been proven in court. The same publishers, together with broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in 2024; that case has not yet been resolved.