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 named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has leveraged the success of its AI models, expanded its range of services, and secured substantial funding without obtaining a valid license from any of the News Media Companies. The publishers assert that Anthropic has gained significant unjust enrichment at their expense.
The lawsuit, initiated on October 6 and initially reported by Cartt.ca, awaits a response from Anthropic, and the allegations remain unproven in court. The claim accuses Anthropic of breaching the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassing their technological protection measures to prevent content copying.
The news outlets claim that they are responsible for producing a substantial portion of Canada’s journalistic content across various formats and platforms, serving millions of readers. Allegedly, Anthropic acquired content for its models by “scraping” vast amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ websites without authorization.
Furthermore, the publishers contend that Anthropic continuously scrapes content based on user queries to develop its AI models without consent. They also highlight that despite concerns expressed by content creators in various industries and multiple lawsuits, Anthropic has not taken steps to halt its unlawful actions.
In a separate lawsuit filed in 2024, the same companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, are pursuing legal action against OpenAI. This case remains unresolved. Similar disputes have emerged globally, such as The New York Times suing OpenAI for using its copyrighted material to train AI systems, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in a related matter.
CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press have jointly filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the tech company breaches copyright by using news content from their websites to train its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence system.