Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages for 'tens of thousands' of copyrighted works. The companies are demanding up to $150,000 per work, with additional fines for stripping identifiable copyright data, potentially amounting to several billion dollars.
Anthropic, already facing multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, and separate suits from BMG and Round Hill Music, is accused of using illegal methods to download and scrape copyrighted works. The complaint names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants, alleging that Mann downloaded over five million pirated books via BitTorrent, while employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror.
According to the filing, Anthropic’s AI models, including 'Claude,' have trained on copyrighted works such as 'Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,' 'Livin’ On a Prayer,' and 'Hallelujah,' among others. The lawsuit highlights the growing challenge of protecting intellectual property in the era of AI.
Despite the high-profile nature of the case, Anthropic has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
