Canada's biggest newspapers are suing Anthropic over 13.5 million articles

Canada's biggest newspapers are suing Anthropic, accusing it of scraping millions of their articles to build and run Claude without paying for them. Torstar, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia and The Canadian Press filed a statement of claim in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on October 6, Cartt.ca reported, and The Canadian Press confirmed the case on Monday.

The suit names Anthropic and its Canadian subsidiary. It is the second time the same group has gone to court over AI: with CBC/Radio-Canada, they sued OpenAI in Ontario in November 2024, and that case has yet to be settled.

What the publishers say Anthropic did

The claim says Anthropic "deliberately 'scrapes'" huge amounts of text from the internet and the publishers' own websites, and uses that "proprietary content to develop its models, without authorization or consent". It says the scraping is ongoing, including to answer users' prompts, and that Anthropic obtained no licence "from any of the News Media Companies".

The publishers make four main claims:

• Copyright infringement: copying their journalism to train and run Claude, in breach of Canada's Copyright Act.
• Breach of contract: automated crawlers such as ClaudeBot ignoring their websites' terms of use, which limit content to personal use.
• Getting round protections: circumventing paywalls, logins and other technological measures meant to stop copying.
• Unjust enrichment: the claim says Anthropic "has been substantially and unjustly enriched to the detriment of the News Media Companies".

They also argue that Claude repeats their work, verbatim, paraphrased or summarised, in answer to users, which draws readers away from their sites, puts off advertisers and cuts the need for subscriptions. The claim says Anthropic "has done nothing to curtail its unlawful behaviour".

"Brazenly misappropriate": the licensing argument

A large part of the claim turns on the fact that Anthropic hasn't signed public licensing deals with news groups, unlike several rivals. "Other AI companies have engaged meaningfully with publishers in other jurisdictions, resulting in legitimate market-based licensing solutions that fairly compensate content creators," it says, according to Cartt. "Rather than seek to obtain the content legally, Anthropic has elected to brazenly misappropriate the News Media Companies' valuable intellectual property."

The claim also says Anthropic was always "aware of its obligations to obtain a valid licence", and that news sites are favoured for AI training because their content is higher quality and more reliable than most of the web.

What they want: C$20,000 a work, and a ban

The publishers ask for damages, including punitive damages for wilful conduct, and the statutory maximum of C$20,000 per infringed work as an alternative to proving actual losses. They also want a permanent injunction stopping Anthropic using their current and future work without written consent.

The scale is large. By the publishers' count, as listed by Broadcast Dialogue, about 13.5 million works have been taken since 2021: some 4.2 million from The Canadian Press, 3.5 million each from Postmedia and Torstar (with sister publishers PNI Maritimes and Metroland) and 2.3 million from The Globe and Mail, a mix of articles they own and ones they license. Broadcast Dialogue says the coalition is seeking potentially billions of dollars.

Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from Cartt or The Canadian Press, and hasn't filed a defence. None of the claims have been tested in court.

Anthropic's copyright fights so far

Anthropic agreed last year to pay $1.5 billion to settle a US class action from authors over millions of books downloaded from pirate sites, after a judge ruled that training on legally bought books was fair use but keeping pirated copies was not. Canada has no US-style fair use, only a narrower "fair dealing" defence, and a US appeals court has already ruled against one AI firm that trained on a publisher's content.

The Canadian case also lands as Anthropic deepens its ties to the country: it has just signed up for its first Canadian data centre, in Nova Scotia. And it follows a fight in Australia, where Anthropic asked for a copyright exception to train AI that the ABC said would cannibalise the news. Publishers that want to keep crawlers out have found robots.txt alone isn't enough.

Why it matters

This is the first major news publisher lawsuit against Anthropic, and it targets the one thing the company has avoided so far: paying newsrooms for their work. A ruling in Ontario, alongside the OpenAI case, could decide whether AI firms need licences to use Canadian journalism at all.

Sources: Cartt.ca (statement of claim, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, October 6, 2026); The Canadian Press via Global News; Broadcast Dialogue (works counts and relief sought).