Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and numerous other music publishers have initiated legal action against AI lab Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The lawsuit, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Anthropic conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works."
The publishers accuse Anthropic of "blatant theft" by using thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model, Claude. This latest lawsuit is described as particularly broad, building on previous cases by accusing Anthropic of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music.
Anthropic has faced prior intellectual property lawsuits, including the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works was legal, acquiring them through piracy was not. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that landmark case.