Canadian Media Giants File Lawsuit Against Anthropic

Courtesy: Dado Ruvic / Reuters

A group of Canada's biggest media companies are suing Anthropic, alleging the AI developer harvested millions of pieces of work without consent or compensation.

The lawsuit details that Anthropic used publishers content for commercial purposes, while ignoring personal-use restrictions and circumventing paywalls. The claim states, "Anthropic’s substantial fundraising and current market valuation are a direct result of Anthropic’s massive, purposeful transfer of value from publishers.

"The publishers, who include Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, and the Canadian Press, are seeking potentially billions in damages. They are asking for up to $20,000 per piece of infringed work. They also note that Anthropic is valued at over $900 billion USD and have received over $100 billion USD in capital investment. Anthropic has not yet issued a statement of defence.

This is at least the third major lawsuit filed by Canadian media companies against AI developers. In February of 2025, a North American coalition including the Toronto Star, sued AI firm Cohere. Later that year, Canadian news publishers filed suit against Open AI, saying that training Chat GPT on their content, was a breach of their copyright. Anthropic has already settled one major lawsuit in American court, where they paid $1.5 billion USD to a group of authors over AI training.

The Canadian publishers from this most recent suit added; "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." The lawsuit seeks permanent injunctions under the copyright Act to prevent Anthropic from further accessing the plaintiffs content without consent.

MAP supports Canadian publishers who are protecting their work and this industry from the existential threats of artificial intelligence. These authors must be properly compensated for their content, in order to maintain the media ecosystem which upholds our democracy!