The publishers say Anthropic capitalized on the commercial success of its AI models
without obtaining a valid licence, and that it has been “unjustly enriched” at their expense. They also claim the company ignored warnings, having done nothing to curtail its unlawful behaviour
despite concerns raised by several content creators
. None of these allegations has been proven in court.
The Claim Goes Beyond Copyright
Copyright infringement is the headline charge, but the statement of claim stacks several others on top of it:
- Scraping large volumes of text from the plaintiffs’ websites without valid licences
- Breaching the websites’ terms of service
- Circumventing technological protection measures built to restrict copying
- Unjust enrichment tied to Claude’s commercial success
The plaintiffs collectively reach millions of readers, with coverage spanning daily print and digital news.
Not Their First AI Lawsuit
The same publishers, along with CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in 2024 over ChatGPT, and that case is still pending. In the US, The New York Times has also sued OpenAI over copyrighted material use, and the Justice Department sided with the tech company last month. It is one more front in a wider run of legal challenges facing AI developers.
Hashlytics Take
The interesting part of this filing is how it is built. A claim about circumventing protection measures and breaching terms of service is about how the content was obtained, not what the model did with it afterward. That sidesteps the argument AI companies lean on most, that training is a transformative use. With the US government now backing OpenAI in the Times case, the Canadian publishers appear to be betting that a case about access, rather than output, is harder to defend.
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