A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, have filed a lawsuit 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 create its large language AI model named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models, expanded its services, and raised significant capital without obtaining proper licensing from any of the News Media Companies. The lawsuit, initiated on October 6 and first disclosed by Cartt.ca, highlights that the allegations are yet to be proven in court as Anthropic has not responded to requests for comments.
The claim asserts that Anthropic breached the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed technological protection measures implemented to prevent the copying of their content. It further states that the news outlets are major contributors to Canada’s journalistic content and collectively cater to millions of readers.
The news publishers accuse Anthropic of “scraping” substantial amounts of text data from the internet and the Plaintiffs’ Websites without authorization to feed into its models and services. They claim that Anthropic continuously scrapes content in response to user queries, utilizing the material without consent for developing its AI models.
In a separate legal action, the same companies, in collaboration with CBC/Radio-Canada, have also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which is still ongoing. This legal dispute mirrors similar cases where news publishers globally have taken legal action against tech companies for utilizing their articles to train AI systems. 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.
Despite concerns raised by various content creators and previous lawsuits, Anthropic allegedly continues its unauthorized practices, as detailed in the statement of claim.