Canada's biggest newspapers sue Anthropic over Claude training

A coalition of Canada's largest news publishers is suing Anthropic in an Ontario court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press say Anthropic infringed their copyright by using their content to develop its Claude models. The statement of claim was filed on October 6 and became public this week.

The publishers say Anthropic did not obtain a valid licence from any of them and has been unjustly enriched. They allege it deliberately scraped large amounts of text from the internet and from their websites, breached the sites' terms of service and circumvented technical protections, including paywalls, that restrict copying.

None of the allegations has been tested in court, and Anthropic has not responded to requests for comment.

The claim adds to a global pile of cases over whether training AI models on published journalism needs permission and payment. Anthropic is also preparing a public listing, which makes legal risk a bigger line item for investors.

Our take

Publishers are choosing courts in their home countries, which multiplies the number of places an AI lab can be sued over the same training data.