A group of news organizations, 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 claim 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 benefited financially from its AI models without obtaining proper licensing from any of the news media companies. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and initially reported by Cartt.ca, highlights the allegations against Anthropic, which have not been proven in court as the company has not responded to requests for comment.
The claim asserts that Anthropic breached the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed technological protections to prevent content copying. The news outlets emphasize their role in producing a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content and serving millions of readers.
The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of scraping substantial amounts of text data from the internet and the plaintiffs’ websites without consent to fuel its AI models. Additionally, it states that Anthropic continues to scrape content in response to user requests.
Despite numerous concerns raised by various content creators and legal actions, including a joint lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, Anthropic is alleged to have persisted in its unauthorized practices. Similar lawsuits have been seen internationally, with The New York Times also suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, a case in which the Justice Department recently sided with the tech company.