A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press allege that Anthropic violated their copyright by using their content to develop its large language AI model called Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has benefited financially from its AI models without obtaining proper licenses from the news media companies, resulting in unjust enrichment at the expense of the publishers. The lawsuit was initiated on October 6 and was first reported by Cartt.ca, with no response from Anthropic as of yet.
The claim asserts that Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed their protective measures against content copying. The news outlets, responsible for a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content, emphasize that they collectively reach millions of readers.
Anthropic allegedly “scrapes” vast amounts of text data from the internet and the plaintiffs’ websites without authorization to feed its AI models. The claim states that Anthropic continues to scrape content based on user prompts, disregarding concerns raised by various content creators and legal actions against its practices.
Additionally, the same news organizations, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, have also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is pending resolution. Similar legal battles have unfolded internationally, with The New York Times suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, a case in which the Justice Department recently sided with the tech company.