Anthropic Sued by Music Publishers Over Alleged Copyright Theft
Anthropic faces a lawsuit from Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell over alleged copyright infringement.
"AI's wild west days are over. Copyright holders are coming for their cut, and Anthropic is in the crosshairs."
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The suit alleges the theft of “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works, seeking damages up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright data. The companies claim this could amount to several billion dollars if awarded the maximum.
The complaint names Anthropic and cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants. It alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. The suit also claims Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which had licensed content from labels. Specific songs mentioned in the training data include “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” “September,” “Hallelujah,” and “Paper Rings.”
This lawsuit follows Anthropic's recent settlement with the publishing industry for $1.5 billion and multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. The plaintiffs describe the alleged actions as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history” to develop Anthropic’s “Claude” AI models.
This lawsuit highlights the growing legal challenges AI developers face regarding copyrighted content used for training. Businesses utilizing AI models must scrutinize their data sources to avoid potential legal liabilities and significant financial penalties.
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