Anthropic Sued by Canada’s Biggest News Publishers

Canada’s largest newspaper groups have taken Anthropic to court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press filed a claim in Ontario Superior Court on 6 October against Anthropic and its Canadian subsidiary, alleging that the company used their journalism to build and run Claude without permission or payment. The suit was first reported by Cartt.ca and carried by The Canadian Press on 19 October. None of the allegations has been tested in court, and Anthropic had not responded to requests for comment.

The publishers make three kinds of claim, according to the details published by Broadcast Dialogue: copyright infringement, breach of contract and unjust enrichment. They say Anthropic’s crawlers, ClaudeBot among them, copied their articles for commercial use, that the company broke the terms of service on their websites, and that it got around paywalls, login checks and network-level protections meant to stop exactly that kind of copying. The claim also says Anthropic still pulls their content when Claude answers users’ questions, so the alleged harm is ongoing rather than limited to past training runs. In the publishers’ words, the company obtained no “valid licence from any of the News Media Companies.”

13.5 million works

The claim lists roughly how many works each plaintiff has published since 2021, split between pieces it owns outright and pieces it licenses from others:

Publisher	Works claimed	Owned	Licensed
The Canadian Press	4,200,000	4,200,000	—
Postmedia and PNI Maritimes	3,500,000	1,750,000	1,750,000
Torstar (Toronto Star and Metroland)	3,500,000	1,600,000	1,900,000
The Globe and Mail	2,300,000	1,000,000	1,300,000

For relief, the publishers ask for general damages, an accounting and handover of Anthropic’s profits or, as an alternative, statutory damages of up to $20,000 per infringed work, plus punitive damages for what they call wilful conduct. They also want permanent injunctions that would stop Anthropic from accessing, scraping or using their current and future work without written consent. Statutory damages at that ceiling across millions of works would run into the billions, but Canadian courts have discretion over the amount, and the figure is a maximum, not a demand for a set sum.

Why Anthropic, and why now

The filing leans on Anthropic’s history in the United States, where a federal court in Northern California found the company had downloaded more than seven million pirated books, a case Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion. The publishers also point out that Anthropic, unlike OpenAI and most large AI developers, has no public content-licensing deal with a major news publisher, and argue that it has “required litigation” before paying creators anything. The same four publishers, joined by CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in Ontario in 2024, and that case has not been settled. Anthropic, which has 60 days to respond because it was served outside Canada, faces the claim as it prepares its stock-market listing, when legal liabilities get read closely by investors.

The suit also has a policy edge. The publishers have pressed Ottawa to say how copyright applies to AI training, arguing that the government’s national AI strategy, unveiled in June, left the question open. Without legislation, the boundary between fair dealing and infringement for AI training in Canada will be drawn by judges, and with two of the country’s biggest AI copyright cases now in the same provincial court, the first rulings may come from Ontario.