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The Ontario lawsuit challenges both the use of news to develop Claude and alleged ongoing scraping in response to user prompts. The allegations remain unproven.
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The October 6 Ontario lawsuit puts two stages of Anthropic’s news-content practices in dispute: alleged unlicensed use of journalism to develop Claude and alleged continued scraping when users submit prompts. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press also accuse the company of breaching website terms and bypassing copying protections. The claims remain unproven, and Anthropic had not commented when the case was reported on October 19. The outcome could affect licensing expectations for AI services that rely on publisher content.
The publishers allege Anthropic copied material from their websites without consent or a valid licence.
The claim also alleges Anthropic continues to scrape news content in response to user prompts, beyond model development.
The lawsuit says Anthropic breached site terms and circumvented technological protections intended to restrict copying.
Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press are taking Anthropic to court over journalism they say it used without permission. Their Ontario copyright lawsuit targets not only the development of Claude, but also alleged ongoing scraping of news content in response to users’ prompts.
The lawsuit was filed on October 6, 2026. The Canadian Press reported the case on October 19 in an article published by Global News, crediting news site Cartt.ca with first reporting the filing. The Canadian Press is also one of the plaintiffs.
The allegations have not been proven in court. Anthropic had not responded to The Canadian Press’s request for comment when its article was published.
The publishers’ statement of claim describes scraping as accessing and copying text from the internet, including their websites. It alleges that Anthropic gathered enormous amounts of that material and used their content, without authorization or consent, to develop its AI models.
The complaint also challenges how Anthropic allegedly obtained the material. The publishers say the company breached their websites’ terms of service and circumvented technological protection measures designed to restrict copying. Their accusation therefore concerns both access to the journalism and its subsequent use.
A second allegation reaches beyond model development: the claim says Anthropic continues scraping content in response to user prompts. That puts collection during the operation of its services alongside the alleged use of news to build the models.
In doing so, Anthropic has been substantially and unjustly enriched to the detriment of the News Media Companies.
The publishers’ statement of claim, quoted by The Canadian Press
The publishers frame the dispute as a commercial one. Their claim says Anthropic built an extensive suite of services and benefited from its models’ commercial success without obtaining a valid licence from any of the news companies.
These publishers have already pursued another major AI developer. The same companies, joined by CBC/Radio-Canada, launched a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024. That case remained unsettled when The Canadian Press reported the Anthropic filing.
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