Canadian court clears lawsuit against OpenAI over AI training copyright

Ontario's Court of Appeal on Friday (13) dismissed OpenAI's appeal and cleared the lawsuit against OpenAI brought by Canada's largest news publishers. It is the first Canadian case on the use of copyrighted content to train generative AI — and the ruling, for now, decides only where the case will be heard, not who is right.

The plaintiffs are Toronto Star Newspapers, Metroland Media, Postmedia Network, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada. They filed the suit in 2024, alleging that OpenAI copied their articles without permission to build and run the models behind ChatGPT, breaching Canadian copyright law and their websites' terms of use, as well as unjust enrichment. The publishers are seeking statutory damages of up to C$20,000 per work.

What the court decided

OpenAI, based in California, argued the case did not belong in Ontario and should be heard in the United States. The Ontario Superior Court had already rejected that argument in November 2025, when Justice Jessica Kimmel ruled the court had jurisdiction. On appeal, the unanimous panel led by Justice B.W. Miller upheld the decision: Ontario has a “real and substantial connection” to the alleged breaches. The court also noted that OpenAI had filed no evidence that a Canadian judgment would conflict with any law in the United States. The company was ordered to pay $100,000 in legal costs to the publishers.

The November 2025 ruling also stayed claims against four OpenAI entities whose involvement was not shown, leaving six defendants — including OpenAI Inc., OpenAI OpCo and OpenAI LLC.

What has not been decided yet

No court has yet decided whether OpenAI infringed copyright. The lawsuit against OpenAI now returns to the Ontario Superior Court, where it will move to the merits stage — when the court will hear whether the company's use of journalism actually breached Canadian law. No hearing date has been set.

OpenAI denies the allegations. According to the company, its models are built from publicly available data, respecting fair use and international standards, and the company says it works with publishers — including display, attribution and links in ChatGPT results — and offers opt-out options.

One case among several

The same publishers — Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press — filed a separate lawsuit against Anthropic on October 21, 2026, with similar claims about the training of Claude. In the United States, lawsuits by news outlets against AI companies have been running since 2023. In Europe, Geekiki has already covered the EU Court of Justice opinion on Gemini and press content: EU court: Gemini answers with press content may breach copyright. Lawsuits over voice cloning and AI music have also been filed: Elvis and Eminem sue Suno over voice cloning and copyright in AI music.

Image credit: Osgoode Hall in Toronto, seat of the Ontario Court of Appeal. Photo: Charles Hoffman, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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This article was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public internet sources, and the information was verified against the original sources cited above. We recommend consulting the original sources for more details.

By Muse