A coalition of Canada's biggest news outlets is suing OpenAI, the maker of artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, alleging the company is illegally using news articles to train its software. News organisations including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC have all joined the suit, reportedly the first of its kind in the country. “Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” the media organisations said in a joint statement. OpenAI says its models are "trained on publicly available data".

The software is "grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation", the company said in an statement to the BBC. "We collaborate closely with news publishers, including in the display, attribution and links to their content in ChatGPT search, and offer them easy ways to opt out should they so desire."

In its 84-page filing, the Canadian media coalition accuses OpenAI of ignoring safeguards like paywalls or copyright disclaimers meant to prevent the unauthorised copying of content. "OpenAI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swaths of content from Canadian media to help develop its products, such as ChatGPT,” the companies said. The group, which includes the publishers of Canada's top newspapers, is seeking punitive damages of C$20,000 ($14,300; £11,000) per article they allege was used to illegally train ChatGPT - a sum that could add up to billions of dollars in compensation. The news organisations are also requesting an order that would force the company to share profits made from using their articles, as well as an injunction prohibiting OpenAI from using them in future. While the lawsuit against OpenAI is a first for Canadian publishers, it follows a similar action in the US launched by the New York Times and other publishers last year. In April, lawyers for the Times accused OpenAI of erasing evidence they needed for trial. In another case, the Authors Guild and a group of major writers including John Grisham also claimed copyright infringement. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was valued at C$219bn after its latest round of fundraising from investors.