There’s no rule that lets the AI take the blame — liability tracks the person who published it.
Short answer
There’s no “the AI did it” defence. Canadian copyright law assigns responsibility to a person or a business, and if you’re the one who published or profited from the copied material, that’s usually you, whatever tool produced it. A vendor contract can shift some of that exposure — but only if it’s written to do so.
The Copyright Act has no computer-generated-works provision and no concept of a machine bearing legal responsibility for anything — every ownership and liability question in the Act runs through a person. “The author of a work shall be the first owner of the copyright therein,” and for work made on the job, the Act provides that “the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright.”
That same structure is the honest way to think about liability: exposure for publishing infringing AI output generally follows the business or employment relationship the same way authorship and ownership do elsewhere in the Act. A business that publishes what its staff produced with an AI tool is the one exposed — not “the AI,” which has no legal existence to answer for anything.
Whether you or your AI vendor absorbs the risk of an infringing output usually comes down to one clause. An “indemnity clause is a promise by one party to compensate the other for specific losses — often losses caused by third-party claims,” which is precisely the scenario at issue if a vendor’s tool generates output that copies someone else’s protected work.
But that promise is rarely unlimited: “Ontario courts enforce limitation of liability and indemnity clauses between commercial parties — but with important qualifications.” A liability cap elsewhere in the same contract can mean the vendor’s indemnity only goes so far before the exposure lands back on you.
Before relying on an AI tool for anything published externally, check the vendor’s terms for an IP-infringement indemnity, and check whether a liability cap elsewhere in the contract would leave you covering the rest yourself. Silence on this point in a vendor’s standard terms is not a good sign.
This sits alongside whether you can use AI images on your website and whether AI art is copyrighted in Canada at all — both feed directly into how exposed a given piece of AI output actually leaves you.
See how AI-output liability gets reviewed as part of a diligence process.
