A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken legal action 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 utilizing their content to develop its large language AI model named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from its AI models’ success without obtaining proper licenses from the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and initially reported by Cartt.ca, highlights that Anthropic has not responded to requests for comments, and the allegations are yet to be proven in court.
The claim asserts that Anthropic violated the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassed technological protection measures put in place to prevent content copying. The news outlets, responsible for a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content with millions of readers collectively, state that Anthropic “scrapes” vast amounts of text data from the internet and their websites without authorization.
Furthermore, the news publishers claim that Anthropic uses their content without consent to develop AI models and continuously scrapes content in response to user queries. The statement of claim also mentions that despite objections raised by various content creators in different industries and other legal actions, Anthropic has not taken steps to stop its unlawful practices.
These same news companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is still ongoing. Similar instances have occurred globally, with news publishers abroad suing tech firms for training AI systems with their articles. For instance, The New York Times sued OpenAI for using its copyrighted material, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in a related case.
The legal battle between the news publishers and Anthropic continues to unfold as the industry grapples with copyright infringement concerns in the realm of AI technology.