Canadian news publishers sue Anthropic over copyright
Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press have sued Anthropic in Ontario, alleging their content was used without permission to develop Claude. The claims are unproven.
What happened
Leading Canadian news organisations have sued Anthropic and its Canadian subsidiary in Ontario. Filed on 6 October and reported around 19 October, the claim is brought by the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Metroland Media, Postmedia Network, PNI Maritimes and The Canadian Press. They allege Anthropic used their content without permission to develop Claude. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and the allegations have not been tested in court.
The allegations
The claim goes beyond copyright. It alleges breach of the sites' terms of service, circumvention of technological protection measures meant to limit copying, and unjust enrichment. It also says Anthropic scrapes content on an ongoing basis in response to user prompts, targeting live answer features as well as past training data.
Damages
According to Broadcast Dialogue, the publishers seek, among other remedies, statutory damages of up to C$20,000 per work. The claim lists approximate numbers of works each publisher has produced since 2021, so the potential total is large, though the court will decide how damages apply.
Background
The same publishers, joined by CBC, sued OpenAI in November 2024; that case is unresolved. Anthropic settled a US authors' lawsuit in 2025 and is preparing for an IPO, where such cases appear as risk factors.
Why it matters
Publishers are splitting between licensing deals and litigation. The real-time scraping claim matters most: as AI assistants replace search, traffic to news sites falls, and a ruling could shape attribution and payment models for AI answers.
What comes next
Anthropic's defence and the preliminary stages will take months. Canada applies a narrower "fair dealing" exception rather than the US "fair use" doctrine, so defences raised in American cases may not carry the same weight in Canadian courts. The parallel case against OpenAI will be a guide, and a settlement through a licensing deal remains possible. The outcome will matter well beyond Canada, because the real-time scraping claim touches how AI assistants retrieve and summarise news for users every day.
What it means for your business
- Update your terms of use to address AI training and answer generation.
- Set a deliberate bot policy in robots.txt, balancing visibility and protection.
- Track whether AI answers cite you as a source.