Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and numerous other music publishers have sued Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging that the AI lab carried out a “brazen campaign of torrenting, scraping and illegal downloading of copyrighted works.”
The lawsuit, which was filed Friday night in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was first reported by Music business around the world. The publishers accuse Anthropic of “blatant theft” by using thousands of copyrighted works to train its Claude AI model.
“We disagree with the publishers’ claims and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court,” an Anthropic spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.
This is not the first intellectual property lawsuit Anthropic has faced. Some of the same lawyers Behind this lawsuit they also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a case filed in January and led the Bartz vs. Anthropic case, in which a group of authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to form products like Claude. Anthropic was ordered pay 1.5 billion dollars in the landmark Bartz case after a judge ruled that while it was legal for the AI lab to use copyrighted works, it was not legal to acquire that content through piracy.
While the cases present similar arguments, there are key differences. This latest lawsuit is particularly broad and builds on other cases, including accusing Anthropic of “blatant piracy” using illegal torrents to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music.
The article was updated to include Anthropic’s comment.