A group of news organizations, including major Canadian newspapers, has taken legal action against the AI firm Anthropic 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 create its large language AI model known as Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from the commercial success of its AI models without obtaining proper licenses from the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, filed on October 6 and first reported by Cartt.ca, alleges that Anthropic has unfairly benefited at the expense of the News Media Companies.
The claim asserts that Anthropic disregarded the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassed technological safeguards put in place 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 statement of claim accuses Anthropic of “scraping” vast amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without authorization to fuel its AI models. It also alleges that Anthropic continues to scrape content in response to user requests.
In a separate legal action in 2024, the same news organizations, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, initiated a lawsuit against OpenAI, which remains unresolved. Similar disputes have arisen internationally, with news publishers like The New York Times also taking legal action against tech companies for using their articles to train AI systems.
Despite objections from various content creators and legal actions in different industries, Anthropic is alleged to have persisted in its unauthorized activities.
