Sony Music, Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over AI Training Data

SAN FRANCISCO —

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music and 33 other music publishers filed a lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday, accusing the artificial intelligence company of running what they called "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history," according to the South China Morning Post and The Verge.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names Anthropic along with its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants, TechCrunch reported. The publishers say Anthropic ran a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale" to build and profit from its Claude family of AI models, according to The Verge.

The Verge reported that the suit accuses Mann personally of using BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and says Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million more from a site called Pirate Library Mirror. The publishers also allege Anthropic scraped song lyrics from Musixmatch and LyricFind, two services that had paid to license that content from the labels, The Verge reported. Songs named in the complaint include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," Earth, Wind & Fire's "September," Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings," according to The Verge.

Billions in potential damages

The publishers are seeking an injunction and statutory damages, Engadget reported, with claims of up to $150,000 for each infringed work and up to $25,000 for every instance in which copyright information was stripped out. Engadget reported that with thousands of songs allegedly involved, the total could run into the billions of dollars.

An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch, "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court."

Part of a wider legal squeeze

The case adds to a string of copyright fights facing Anthropic. Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing and ABKCO Music & Records are pursuing separate lawsuits over song lyrics, while BMG has filed its own claim covering artists including Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande and the Rolling Stones, according to the South China Morning Post. The Verge reported that Round Hill Music has also sued the company.

Anthropic settled a related case brought by authors, known as Bartz v. Anthropic, for $1.5 billion, after a judge ruled that while training AI on copyrighted material was legal, obtaining it through piracy was not, TechCrunch reported.

The new lawsuit lands as Anthropic is reportedly preparing for a public stock offering that investors have discussed valuing at as much as $2 trillion, according to the Financial Times, cited by the South China Morning Post.