Canada’s big newspapers sue Anthropic

Rules and risks
Copyright
Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press say Claude was trained on their articles without a licence.
Published

October 19, 2026

What happened

  • Canada’s largest news publishers, Postmedia, Torstar (the Toronto Star), The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press, have filed a copyright suit against Anthropic and its Canadian subsidiary in an Ontario court. The claim was filed on October 6 and became public on October 19.
  • They say Anthropic copied their articles to train Claude without a licence (paid permission), got around the technical measures that block copying, broke their terms of service, and keeps scraping their sites to answer user questions.
  • Anthropic has not commented. Nothing is proven in court. The same publishers sued OpenAI in 2024; that case is still open. Anthropic already paid a large settlement to US book authors in 2025.

Why it matters for you

Training data is becoming a cost line, country by country. Each licence or settlement raises the price of building a model, and that cost reaches users through subscriptions and API prices. It also shapes what a model may read: AI summaries of the news will lean more on sources that signed a deal, and less on those that sued. When you use AI to follow the news, ask where its facts come from.

Sources

Notes for learning. Nothing here is investment advice. All news