Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages relating to “tens of thousands” of copyrighted works. The music publishers are asking for up to £115,000 per work, plus up to £19,000 for each instance in which identifiable copyright data was stripped. Taken together, the damages could reach several billion pounds should a court rule in favour of the labels and award the maximum sums.
The action is the latest in a series of high-profile legal challenges facing the AI company. Anthropic recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for £1.15 billion. It has also contended with multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO, alongside separate claims from BMG and Round Hill Music.
Founders named as individual defendants
In addition to naming Anthropic as an entity, the complaint lists co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download more than five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It further claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind, both of which paid to license content from the labels.
According to the filing, the publishers bring the action to hold accountable those behind what they describe as one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. The complaint alleges that Anthropic and its founders conducted a campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate and profit from Anthropic’s Claude series of artificial intelligence models.
Songs identified in the training data
The complaint names specific tracks said to have been found in Anthropic’s training data. Among them 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”.
The copyright dispute adds to the mounting pressure on AI developers over the material used to train large language models. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Image: theverge.com
