Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other music publishers sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the AI lab conducted a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works." The publishers accuse Anthropic of using thousands of copyrighted works, including those containing lyrics and sheet music, to train its AI model Claude.
Anthropic denied the claims, stating: "We disagree with the publishers' claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court." This lawsuit comes after the landmark Bartz v. Anthropic case, where Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion after a judge ruled that while using copyrighted works was legal, acquiring them through piracy was not.
This latest lawsuit is notably broader than previous cases, accusing Anthropic of "flagrant piracy" through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of books. Some of the same lawyers representing the publishers also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a separate case filed in January.