Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and numerous other music publishers have initiated legal action against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the AI lab engaged in an “audacious scheme of unlawfully torrenting, scraping, and downloading protected works.”
The lawsuit, submitted late Friday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was initially reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers accuse Anthropic of “flagrant appropriation” by utilizing thousands of copyrighted materials to develop its AI model, Claude.
“We dispute the claims made by the publishers and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court,” an Anthropic spokesperson stated in an email sent to TechCrunch.
This is not Anthropic’s inaugural encounter with an intellectual property lawsuit. Some of the same legal counsel involved in this current lawsuit also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a case filed in January and previously spearheaded the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where authors accused Anthropic of leveraging copyrighted works to train products such as Claude. Anthropic was mandated to pay $1.5 billion in the significant Bartz case after a judge determined that while the AI lab’s use of copyrighted works was permissible, acquiring that content through piracy was not.
Although these cases present similar arguments, crucial distinctions exist. This most recent lawsuit is notably extensive and builds upon the preceding cases, including by accusing Anthropic of “blatant piracy” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing song lyrics and sheet music.
This article has been updated to include Anthropic’s statement.