Ontario’s Court of Appeal has rejected OpenAI’s challenge to Canadian jurisdiction, clearing the way for a copyright lawsuit by the country’s largest news organisations over the use of their journalism to train ChatGPT.

A unanimous three-judge panel dismissed the appeal on Friday, November 13, 2026, upholding an earlier Ontario Superior Court ruling that the province’s courts can hear the case. OpenAI had argued that the alleged infringements fell outside the reach of Canadian law and belonged in a U.S. courtroom.

The plaintiffs are Torstar, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC/Radio-Canada. They accuse OpenAI of taking their reporting without permission or payment to train the models behind ChatGPT, and are suing for breach of the Copyright Act, breach of their websites’ terms of use and unjust enrichment.

The court found that Ontario has a “real and substantial connection” to the alleged breaches and ordered OpenAI to pay $100,000 in legal costs. The case is the first in Canada to address the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.

Why it matters

The ruling does not decide whether OpenAI broke the law, but it confirms that foreign AI companies can be taken to court where the content they used was produced. That principle is being watched by publishers worldwide, including Arabic-language media whose archives feed large language models, and it could push AI firms towards more licensing deals.

Source: The Canadian Press via CTV News and Broadcast Dialogue

By the TechMojaz team