Canada's largest news publishers are taking Anthropic to court. Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press say Anthropic infringed their copyright by using their content to develop its Claude AI models, in a lawsuit filed Oct. 6, 2026 in Ontario Superior Court and reported by The Canadian Press on Monday, Oct. 19. The case was first reported by Cartt.ca.
"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.
What the publishers allege
- Anthropic "deliberately 'scrapes'" large amounts of text from the internet and from the plaintiffs' websites to train its models, and keeps scraping in response to user prompts.
- It broke the sites' terms of service and got around technical protections meant to stop copying, including paywalls and login checks, Broadcast Dialogue reports.
- The Canadian Press alone has about 4.2 million works at issue, the largest share among the plaintiffs, according to the claim as reported by Broadcast Dialogue.
The publishers seek damages, an accounting and handover of profits or, alternatively, statutory damages of up to $20,000 per infringed work, plus punitive damages and permanent injunctions against further scraping. Anthropic had not responded to a request for comment, and none of the allegations have been proven in court.
Second big AI case from the same group
The same publishers, together with CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in 2024, and that case has not been settled, The Canadian Press reports. The new claim also points to Anthropic's $1.5 billion U.S. settlement with book authors. For more on how sites are pushing back on AI, see our story on websites blocking AI agents, including Grok.