Canadian publishers sue Anthropic over alleged copyright infringement in training Claude

What happened

Canada's largest news publishers — Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Press — sued Anthropic in Ontario court on October 6, 2026, alleging the company infringed their copyrights by using their content to develop Claude without a licence. The lawsuit was first reported by Cartt and re-reported by Global News / MobileSyrup on October 19.

Allegations

The statement of claim alleges that Anthropic copied text data from the publishers' websites, used it without authorization or consent to train its AI models, built commercial services and raised significant capital on that basis without obtaining a licence, circumvented the protection measures the publishers put in place to prevent copying, and scrapes their content on an ongoing basis via user prompts.

Context

The same publishers (plus CBC) launched a similar lawsuit against OpenAI in 2024, which has not been settled. The publishers have also been pressing the federal government for rules on how AI companies use copyrighted content, after the national AI strategy failed to address it.

Caveats

All claims are allegations that have yet to be proven in court. The Canadian Press's exact pleading details are not available in the reporting above; reviewer may want the Ontario Superior Court docket details confirmed.