A coalition of Canadian media organizations has launched a sweeping legal action in Ontario Superior Court against AI developer Anthropic and its Canadian subsidiary, alleging ongoing unauthorized scraping of their copyrighted journalism.
As first reported by our sister publication, CARTT.ca, the lawsuit – filed on Oct. 6 – sees the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Metroland Media, Postmedia Network and PNI Maritimes LP, as well as The Canadian Press, come together seeking potentially billions in damages.
The suit accuses Anthropic of engaging in the systematic harvesting and misappropriation of millions of works to train and operate its commercial artificial intelligence models, including flagship assistant “Claude” without permission, licensing agreements, or financial compensation in violation of the Copyright Act.
The publishers argue that Anthropic violated binding contractual terms by using automated web crawlers (such as “ClaudeBot”) to scrape content for commercial purposes, circumventing paywalls and ignoring personal-use restrictions. The claim also states that Anthropic bypassed network-level protections and login authentications designed to restrict unauthorized data extraction.
The publishers’ claim points out that as of May, Anthropic had raised approximately $125 billion USD in capital and was valued in excess of $965 billion USD, with over a million users signing up for Claude per day.
“Anthropic’s substantial fundraising and current market valuation are a direct result of Anthropic’s massive, purposeful transfer of value from publishers…Anthropic’s conduct harms the market for the Plaintiffs’ news and news-related content, diverts readers from the authorized platforms for that content, reduces the number of paying subscribers, and discourages advertisers from continuing to pay for advertising in the Plaintiffs’ publications,” the claim states. “By using the Plaintiffs’ Works to create substitutes for visiting the Plaintiffs’ or the Plaintiffs’ licensees’ websites, Anthropic is misappropriating the Plaintiffs’ substantial advertising, subscription, and licensing revenue opportunities.”
The publishers also point to the company’s previous infringement after the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that Anthropic had downloaded over seven million pirated copies of books and paid nothing for them.
“…in contrast to nearly every major artificial intelligence company, including OpenAI, Anthropic has yet to execute any form of public content licensing agreement with major publishers. Instead, Anthropic has required litigation and Court intervention as a precondition to paying content creators anything, notwithstanding significant damages [of $1.5 billion USD in a settlement].”
Scale of alleged misappropriation
The publishers’ claim emphasizes that while other AI developers have engaged meaningfully with the media sector to establish fair, market-based licensing frameworks, Anthropic has chosen to bypass licensing in favour of wholesale extraction.
They’re seeking relief for breach of contract, copyright infringement and unjust enrichment, in addition to general damages, an accounting and disgorgement of commercial profits or alternatively, statutory damages of up to $20,000 per infringed work, alongside punitive and exemplary damages for willful conduct. The suit also seeks permanent and wide-ranging injunctions under he Copyright Act to prevent Anthropic from further accessing, scraping, or utilizing the plaintiffs’ current and future works without written consent.
The Canadian Press owns the largest number of works allegedly scraped at 4.2M, followed by Postmedia and PNI Maritimes at 1.75M.
