SONY MUSIC AND WARNER CHAPPELL SUE ANTHROPIC OVER COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the AI company illegally obtained tens of thousands of copyrighted musical works to train its AI model Claude. The complaint names Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. According to the filing, the publishers characterise the conduct as "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

The lawsuit alleges that Benjamin Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that Anthropic employees downloaded at least two million additional books from Pirate Library Mirror. The complaint further claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from licensed content on sites including MusixMatch and LyricFind. The publishers are seeking up to £150,000 in damages per work and up to £25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data, potentially totalling several billion pounds if a court awards maximum damages.

This represents the latest in a series of legal actions against Anthropic over training data practices. Anthropic recently settled a separate suit brought by the publishing industry for £1.5 billion. The company has also faced multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG and Round Hill Music. The outcome of this case may have implications for how AI companies legally source training data from copyrighted works.