Canadian news publishers have sued Anthropic over claims it used their journalism to develop Claude and retrieved content from their websites for user queries, bringing both practices before an Ontario court.
Cartt.ca first reported the publishers’ Oct. 6 lawsuit, The Canadian Press and Broadcast Dialogue said. The Canadian Press is a plaintiff, along with The Globe and Mail, Torstar and Postmedia. They allege copyright infringement, violations of website terms and circumvention of measures intended to limit copying. A court has not decided those claims.
The publishers describe two ways they say Anthropic uses their work: incorporating reporting into the development of Claude and accessing their sites after users submit questions. The allegations concern both material collected for an AI model and content retrieved while people use the service.
Anthropic’s crawler policy describes separate tools for those activities. ClaudeBot gathers web material that might contribute to training, while Claude-User can fetch pages following a user’s request. Anthropic says its bots observe website restrictions set through robots.txt. The policy describes its general practices and does not address the Ontario lawsuit.
Broadcast Dialogue reported that the publishers say Anthropic benefits from their work without a license while they risk losing potential advertising, subscription and licensing revenue. Those claimed losses have not been assessed by a court.
The Canadian Press said Anthropic had not answered its request for comment by the time of its Oct. 19 report.
The publishers brought a separate Ontario action against OpenAI, with CBC/Radio-Canada joining them, on Nov. 28, 2024. On Nov. 7, 2025, a judge rejected a jurisdiction challenge from six OpenAI entities, allowing the claims against them to proceed in Ontario. That ruling addressed where the case could be heard; it did not decide the copyright allegations.
