Sony Music and Warner Chappell Sue Anthropic Over Copyright Infringement
Sony Music and Warner Chappell have initiated a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging significant violations of intellectual property rights. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, involves claims concerning “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works, with potential damages that could reach several billion dollars. The music companies are seeking up to $150,000 for each infringed work, plus an additional $25,000 for instances where copyright information was removed.
Previous Legal Challenges for Anthropic
This legal action is one of several that Anthropic has recently faced. The company settled a lawsuit from the publishing industry for $1.5 billion and has been the target of multiple suits from other major music entities, including Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, BMG, and Round Hill Music.
Allegations Against Anthropic’s Co-Founders
In addition to the company itself, the lawsuit names Anthropic’s Co-Founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, as individual defendants. It is alleged that Mann used BitTorrent to illicitly download over five million pirated books, while employees are accused of downloading an additional two million from Pirate Library Mirror. The lawsuit also claims that Anthropic unlawfully scraped lyrics from licensed sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind.
Implications for Anthropic’s AI Models
The complaint describes the legal action as an effort to hold Anthropic accountable for what the publishers deem one of the largest intellectual property thefts in history. It accuses Anthropic and its founders of illegally downloading and utilising copyrighted materials to develop and profit from their “Claude” series of AI models. Some of the specific copyrighted songs identified in Anthropic’s training data include 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.” Anthropic has yet to comment on these allegations.
Reporting based on coverage first published by theverge.com.