AI company Anthropic sued in Ontario court

A group of Canada's largest publishers are suing AI company Anthropic in the Ontario court. The publishers, which include Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and the Canadian Press, claim that Anthropic infringed on their copyright by using their content to develop Claude. The lawsuit was filed on Oct. 6, and initially reported by Cartt.

"Anthropic has capitalized on the commercial success of its AI models, building an expansive suite of services, and raised significant capital — all without obtaining a valid licence from any of the News Media Companies," says the statement of claim.

The claim indicates that Anthropic breached and circumvented the protection measures put in place to prevent copying of their content. Additionally, it says that Anthropic accesses and copies a lot of text data from the internet and the Plaintiff's websites. Anthropic then allegedly uses that content without authorization or consent to train its AI models. Further, the lawsuit indicates that Anthropic scrapes content on an ongoing basis because of ongoing user prompts.

These publishers have been trying to get the federal government to take a stand on how AI companies use copyrighted content after the national AI strategy failed to address the problem.

The allegations have yet to be proven in court. The same publishers and CBC launched a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which has also not been settled.