Some of the world's leading music publishers are suing Anthropic, the creators of AI Claude, after it was revealed that the company pirated over 7 million books to train its AI. Despite admitting to this illegal activity, Anthropic has only paid $1.5 billion in a settlement, far less than the company's current valuation of $2 trillion.

The music publishers, including Sony, EMI and Warner Chappell, allege that Anthropic also pirated thousands of their copyrighted musical compositions, harming songwriters who are increasingly competing with AI-generated works in music charts.

Among the pirated works are titles featuring the complete works of the Beatles, Taylor Swift’s best songs, and VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Rock & Roll. The publishers argue that without an injunction, Anthropic will continue to violate music copyrights and improperly substitute artists in their markets by reproducing song lyrics verbatim and generating new songs that mimic popular works.

The revelations come from Anthropic staff chats, which show that co-founder Benjamin Mann personally used BitTorrent to download and upload millions of pirated books from Library Genesis in July 2021. His co-founder, Dario Amodei, allegedly approved the torrenting, and both are named as defendants in the lawsuit.