Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and a number of other music publishers have sued Anthropic and co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, accusing the AI Institute of conducting a “brazen campaign to illegally torrent, scrape, and download copyrighted works.”
The lawsuit was filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers have accused Anthropic of “blatant theft” by using thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model, Claude.
Anthropic could not be reached for comment prior to publication. TechCrunch will update this article if we hear back from the companies.
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced intellectual property litigation. Some of the same lawyers behind this lawsuit also represented Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a lawsuit filed in January, and led the Barts v. Anthropic case, in which a group of authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to train products like Claude. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in the landmark Bartz lawsuit after a judge ruled that AI Labs was legal to use copyrighted works, but illegal to obtain that content through copyright infringement.
Although these lawsuits make similar claims, there are important differences. This latest lawsuit is particularly wide-ranging and builds on other lawsuits, including accusing Anthropic of “blatant copyright infringement” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including lyrics and sheet music.
