Four newsrooms, 13.5 million works
Canada’s largest news publishers have sued Anthropic in the Ontario Superior Court, alleging that the company trained and operates Claude on their journalism without a licence. The plaintiffs are Postmedia and PNI Maritimes, Torstar’s Toronto Star and Metroland Media, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press. The claim was filed on 6 October and reported by CBC on 19 October, after the news site Cartt.ca found it first.
“Anthropic has capitalized on the commercial success of its AI models, building an expansive suite of services, and raised significant capital — all without obtaining a valid licence from any of the News Media Companies,” the statement of claim says. “In doing so, Anthropic has been substantially and unjustly enriched to the detriment of the News Media Companies.”
Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment and has not filed a statement of defence. The allegations have not been proven in court.
The works, counted
The claim enumerates the material at issue since 2021, according to Broadcast Dialogue: approximately 4.2 million works for The Canadian Press, 3.5 million for Postmedia and PNI Maritimes, 3.5 million for Torstar’s titles, and 2.3 million for The Globe and Mail. For three of the four, roughly half the total is licensed rather than owned outright.
That is about 13.5 million works. Under Canada’s Copyright Act the publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to C$20,000 per infringed work as an alternative to other monetary relief, alongside an accounting and disgorgement of profits, punitive damages, and permanent injunctions barring further scraping without written consent.
Not just training — ongoing retrieval
The claim goes beyond the training-data argument that has dominated these cases. It says Anthropic “deliberately ‘scrapes’ (i.e. accesses and copies) enormous amounts of text data from the internet and from the Plaintiffs’ Websites,” and that it continues to scrape content in response to user prompts — that is, at inference time, not only during training.
It also alleges breach of the publishers’ terms of service and circumvention of technological protection measures, naming the ClaudeBot crawler and claiming Anthropic bypassed paywalls, personal-use restrictions, network protections and login authentication. Circumvention of a technological protection measure is a separate head of liability under Canadian law from copying itself.
The publishers argue the comparison with Anthropic’s peers is unfavourable: the claim says Anthropic “has yet to execute any form of public content licensing agreement with major publishers,” and that it “has required litigation and Court intervention as a precondition to paying content creators anything.” That is a reference to the US case in which Anthropic was found to have downloaded more than seven million pirated books and settled for $1.5bn.
The second Canadian case
The same companies, joined then by CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in 2024 over the same conduct. That case has not been resolved, and OpenAI is contesting whether an Ontario court has jurisdiction at all. CBC is not a plaintiff in the Anthropic claim.
Under Ontario rules a defendant served outside Canada has up to 60 days to respond. What Anthropic files — a defence on the merits, or a jurisdictional challenge like OpenAI’s — is the next thing to watch, and it will arrive during the window in which the company is expected to go public.
