Sony Music and Warner Chappell sue Anthropic over copyright
Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The music publishers are seeking damages for the alleged copyright infringement involving tens of thousands of works that, they claim, were used to develop and operate the Claude artificial intelligence models.
As The Verge reports, the plaintiffs are asking for up to $150,000 for each work, as well as up to $25,000 for each instance of removal of identified copyright information. If the court grants Sony Music and Warner Chappell's claims and awards the maximum amounts, compensation could reach several billion dollars.
Allegations of using pirated content
The lawsuit names not only Anthropic as defendants, but also the company's co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann. The plaintiffs claim that Mann downloaded more than five million pirated books via BitTorrent, while Anthropic employees downloaded at least another two million books from Pirate Library Mirror.
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The music publishers also state that Anthropic collected song lyrics from the MusixMatch and LyricFind websites, which paid labels to license the content. The complaint describes these actions as one of the largest and most brazen ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.
Which songs are mentioned in the case
Among the songs that, according to the plaintiffs, were found in Anthropic's training data are 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.
This is not Anthropic's first major legal dispute over the use of copyrighted materials. The company previously settled a $1.5 billion lawsuit from the publishing industry and has also faced lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music. Anthropic did not provide a comment immediately after the outlet's inquiry.
