Photo Credit: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco, by Ken Lund / CC by 2.0
A group of music publishers headed by Sony and Warner is suing Anthropic for “tens of thousands” over the allegedly blatant theft of copyrighted music.
A group of music publishers led by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music is suing Anthropic (the AI company behind popular chat model Claude), naming CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. The lawsuit alleges Anthropic trained its AI models by unlawfully scraping “tens of thousands” of music publishers’ copyrighted compositions, making it unique compared to most lawsuits of a similar nature.
It’s a song and dance that has become increasingly common amid the rise of artificial intelligence. But the music publishers’ case, filed on Friday in federal court in San Francisco, stands out for two major reasons: it focuses on the allegedly “blatant” piracy of copyrighted compositions on a previously unheard-of scale, and it specifically names the company’s co-founders among its defendants.
“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models,” the filing reads.
Other lawsuits against Anthropic, such as BMG’s, claim infringement against a specific number of works. BMG alleges infringement on only 493 works, which is a comparatively small number.
In terms of damage, according to Sony and Warner’s lawsuit, the “tens of thousands” of infringed works carry a maximum penalty of $150,000 per infringement, quickly adding up to a staggering amount.
Anthropic continues to assert that its use of these materials for AI training qualifies as fair use. But the methods used to obtain the materials—like torrenting files from the internet and lacking a license—might make that harder to defend.
“We disagree with the publishers’ claims, and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” Anthropic said in a statement.
The music publishers’ suit joins prior litigation filed by UMG, Concord, Round Hill, and BMG. Essentially, every major publishing arm is taking up the fight against unethically sourced, copyrighted material being used to train large language models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.