As Canadian companies increasingly integrate AI tools into their business practices and case law develops around claims involving other types of technology, class action lawyers share the most notable technology-related claims they’ve recently observed – and the trends they expect to see more of in the future.
Price-fixing claims involving AI tools
In Canada, a typically reliable way to predict future class action trends is to examine the activity in US courts.
Andrew McCoomb, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP and co-chair of its Toronto litigation department, flagged one such trend winding through US courts: class action claims alleging anti-competitive AI-powered pricing schemes. These claims allege that businesses are using AI-powered algorithms to generate pricing recommendations.
These algorithms – which analyze consumer data and market conditions like supply, demand, and competitor prices to generate pricing recommendations – are not new, having been used for years by travel and retail websites. This type of “dynamic pricing” is typically traced back to the 1980s, when airlines developed systems for adjusting airline fares in real time, based on factors like the number of remaining seats on a flight or how close the departure date is to a booking date.
However, problems arise when this technology is used for anti-competitive purposes. In August 2024, for example, the US Department of Justice and multiple state attorneys general filed a civil lawsuit against property management software company RealPage, alleging it used an AI-powered algorithm to illegally coordinate rental housing prices.
According to the DOJ’s complaint, RealPage contracted with competing landlords who agreed to share non-public, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and lease terms, which was then used to train and run RealPage’s AI-powered algorithmic pricing software. That software generated recommendations on apartment rental pricing and other lease terms for the participating landlords.
In a press release about the complaint, a prosecutor said that “by feeding sensitive data into a sophisticated algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, RealPage has found a modern way to violate a century-old [antitrust] law through systematic coordination of rental housing prices – undermining competition and fairness for consumers in the process.”
“Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law,” the prosecutor added.
Months later, Canadian renters filed a proposed class action alleging similar claims against rent pricing software YieldStar, which RealPage owns.
McCoomb says one way to understand these schemes is by thinking of a group of business owners targeting the same market and saying, “‘Let’s get together and discuss how we can best price our products to make sure we can make the most profitable sales.’”
“That conversation potentially gets into the territory of competitors conspiring with one another to arrive at the right pricing model, which potentially could be illegal depending on how they go about doing it and what they agree,” McCoomb says. “It’s one thing to share information. It’s another thing to make an agreement with other people on the basis of that information as to what you’re going to do.”
The central thrust of antitrust claims involving AI-powered algorithmic pricing is that those models “potentially give you the ability to do indirectly through a GenAI model what you shouldn’t be able to do directly,” the lawyer adds. “That potentially gives rise to class action, antitrust liability.”
According to McCoomb, “a very, very common path” for antitrust class action litigation is for US litigants and courts to “set the precedent and often start the major conspiracy claims.” The same claims are then often brought to Canadian courts. Canada and the US abide by similar antitrust principles.
He says that while antitrust cases are less likely to go to trial in Canada than in the US, he’s not aware of any structural or legal reasons that would prevent the concepts “animating those US antitrust claims [from having] some traction potentially in Canada, at least as far as the business of plaintiff-side class action lawyers putting together a claim and trying to advance it for some kind of recovery for their class.”
AI copyright infringement claims
For claims involving AI products in Canada, those alleging copyright infringement are among the most high-profile – and this trend isn’t likely to taper off anytime soon.
One of the most closely watched cases in this area is Doan v. Clearview Inc., a federal lawsuit a Quebec photographer filed in 2020 against a US company providing facial recognition and identification services. The previous year, the RCMP purchased licences to use Clearview, whose technology uses web crawlers to find and compile a large database of images from various sources. Clearview no longer operates in Canada.
In her proposed class action, Doan alleged that Clearview had infringed on her and other Canadians’ copyrights by collecting their images for its database without their consent.
A federal judge rejected Doan’s bid to certify the class, which she framed as residents or citizens of Canada who are the authors of the photographs collected by Clearview, or their “assignees or licensees in the copyright.” According to the judge, Doan had failed to prove that there was an identifiable class – the proposed class members could not self-identify based on the class definition, and Clearview could not identify class members based on metadata in its database. The judge rejected the other methods Doan proposed to identify class members.
In July, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the certification judge’s analysis contained errors and remitted Doan’s request to the lower court.
Nicole Henderson, a partner at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP who specializes in class action and other complex disputes, told Lexpert that the allegations of the Clearview case are “consistent with the framing of a number of AI class actions that we’ve seen in the US so far,” adding, “A big substantive issue that the courts will have to grapple with in dealing with these actions, if they move towards a merits determination, is whether the use of copyrighted work by AI companies, particularly for training large language models, constitutes fair use of that material or not.”
At least one other class action with similar copyright claims is pending in a Canadian court: In May, a Vancouver author named James Bernard MacKinnon filed a proposed class action against Anthropic, alleging the US-based AI company infringed on the copyright of Canadian authors by using their materials to train its large language models.
This type of copyright claim also shows up outside the class action space. Last year, CanLII and a group of Canadian media companies – including Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail Inc., and Canadian Press Enterprises Inc. – made headlines when they respectively filed lawsuits against a small AI-driven legal tech company and OpenAI. In each case, the plaintiffs claimed copyright infringement by the defendants, who are accused of scraping the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content to redistribute for profit or train AI tools.
While both Henderson and McCoomb say they expect to see more copyright claims related to AI products in the coming years, Henderson says she anticipates AI tools to trigger other types of class action claims, like negligence, breach of contract, or consumer protection.
“I think it’s likely that this will be a growth area in the next few years,” she says.
Shifting from data breaches to data misuse
For years, privacy class actions in Canada have focused primarily on consumer data breaches – scenarios where consumers’ confidential, private, protected, or sensitive information is exposed to parties who are not authorized to access it. In recent years, however, a series of appellate court rulings has created a distinct split in Canada, in which some jurisdictions are upholding a higher bar for class certification on data breach class actions than others.
In the meantime, another trend in the privacy class action space has emerged: class actions that allege improper uses of data that may have been collected with consent.
“Whether that’s using personal information to target advertising or other services, [or] whether that’s providing customer or consumer information to third parties, I think we’re seeing more cases that have to do with what companies can do with your data once they have it,” Henderson says.
For example, Henderson points to class actions filed in British Columbia and Quebec against Flo Health, a popular menstrual health tracking app, alleging the company shared consumers’ sensitive data to third parties without their consent. Unlike privacy class action claims focused on data breaches, which are typically triggered by criminal activity like hacking, these claims allege the defendant intentionally misused their data.
Henderson does not expect cases alleging data breaches to disappear, even though “the substantive law related to them has become less favourable to plaintiffs in certain provinces.” Still, she says, plaintiffs are “starting to diversify beyond class actions related to data breaches alone.”
Notable class actions alleging AI copyright infringement
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Doan v. Clearview Inc. (filed 2020):
A Quebec photographer sued Clearview, a US company that provides facial recognition and identification services by using web crawlers to compile a database of images. Doan alleged that Clearview had infringed on her and other Canadians’ copyright by collecting their images without their consent. -
James Bernard MacKinnon v. Anthropic PBC (filed 2025):
A Vancouver author filed a proposed class action against Anthropic, alleging the US-based AI company infringed on the copyright of Canadian authors by using their materials to train its large language models.