Canadian news publishers sue Anthropic over copyright

A coalition that includes Canada's largest newspapers and its national news agency filed the suit against the AI company in an Ontario court on Oct 6. The allegations have not been proven, and Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment.

What the claim alleges

• Copying content to build its AI models
• Breaching the websites' terms of service
• Getting around anti-copying protections
• Scraping articles in answer to user prompts

The publishers say Anthropic copied their content without a licence to build its Claude models, breached their websites' terms of service and got around measures meant to block copying.

“Anthropic has been substantially and unjustly enriched to the detriment of the News Media Companies,” the statement of claim says.

— The publishers' statement of claim

And us?

The same publishers sued OpenAI in 2024, a case not yet settled, and are pushing Ottawa to take a stand on how AI systems use copyrighted content after the national AI strategy left the issue out.