A group of news publishers, including major Canadian newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company 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 named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has profited from the success of its AI models without obtaining proper licenses from the news media companies, resulting in unjust enrichment for Anthropic at the expense of the publishers. The lawsuit, initiated on October 6, was first disclosed by Cartt.ca. Anthropic has not yet provided a comment, and the allegations have not been proven in court.
The claim asserts that Anthropic violated the terms of service of the news media websites and bypassed their technological safeguards intended to prevent content copying. The publishers argue that they are significant contributors to Canada’s journalistic landscape, catering to millions of readers through various platforms.
Furthermore, the claim states that Anthropic obtained content by “scraping” substantial amounts of text data from the internet and the plaintiffs’ websites without permission, using it to develop AI models. The publishers allege that Anthropic continues to scrape content in response to user requests without authorization.
The statement of claim highlights that despite concerns raised by content creators in different industries through lawsuits and public critiques, Anthropic has not taken steps to rectify its unlawful actions. The same consortium of companies previously filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, alongside CBC/Radio-Canada, which is still pending.
Similar legal battles have occurred globally, with news publishers overseas suing tech firms for utilizing their articles to train AI systems. For instance, The New York Times took legal action against OpenAI for unauthorized use of its copyrighted material, a case in which the Justice Department recently supported the tech company.
CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press have jointly filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for allegedly breaching copyright by extracting content from their websites to train its ChatGPT generative AI system.
This article is based on a report from CBC News.