Major Canadian publishers accuse Anthropic of scraping their articles to train Claude, bypassing the technical safeguards on their websites. They had previously taken legal action against OpenAI in 2024.
A coalition comprising Canada’s leading media groups — Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press — has brought a copyright infringement case against Anthropic before an Ontario court. The claim, filed on 6 October, was made public on 19 October.
Web crawlers in the dock
The publishers accuse Anthropic of collecting their content for commercial purposes using bots such as ClaudeBot, bypassing network protections and subscriber-only access, and then using it to develop Claude without authorisation or a licence. Each claimant has quantified the volume of works affected since 2021: approximately 4.2 million for The Canadian Press, 3.5 million for Postmedia and PNI Maritimes, the same number for Torstar’s publications, and 2.3 million for The Globe and Mail. The statutory damages claimed can amount to up to 20,000 dollars per work.
The same publishers, joined at the time by CBC/Radio-Canada, had launched a similar legal action against OpenAI in 2024, which is still pending. They are also urging Ottawa to enshrine specific protections in law against the unauthorised use of content for training AI systems.
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