A group of news organizations, including major newspapers in Canada, has 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 using their content to develop its large language AI model named Claude.
According to the statement of claim, Anthropic has benefited financially from its AI models’ success without obtaining a valid license from the news media companies. The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 6, alleges that Anthropic has been enriched at the expense of the news media companies.
The claim accuses Anthropic of breaching the news media websites’ terms of service and bypassing technological protection measures put in place to prevent content copying. The news outlets emphasize their role in generating a significant portion of Canada’s journalistic content and highlight their large readership.
The lawsuit claims that Anthropic extracts large amounts of text data from the internet, including the plaintiffs’ websites, through a process called “scraping” and uses this content without permission to develop its AI models. It also states that Anthropic continues to scrape content in response to user requests.
Despite concerns raised by various content creators and legal actions in other industries, the statement of claim asserts that Anthropic has not taken steps to stop its unauthorized behavior. Additionally, the same news companies are involved in a separate lawsuit against OpenAI, which is ongoing.
Similar cases of news publishers suing tech companies for using their content to train AI systems have been seen globally. For instance, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using its copyrighted material, with the Justice Department recently supporting the tech company in the matter.