Music Publishers Sue Anthropic Over Alleged Piracy in Training Claude
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and numerous other music publishers file a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging a brazen campaign of intellectual property theft. The suit, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the AI company of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading thousands of copyrighted works, including lyrics and sheet music, to train its AI model Claude.
Anthropic disputes the publishers' claims and says it intends to defend itself robustly in court. This is not the company's first intellectual property battle. Some of the same lawyers behind this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in an earlier suit, and previously led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a judge orders Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion after ruling that while using copyrighted works for training is legal, acquiring them through piracy is not.
The new lawsuit is notably broad and builds on the earlier cases, accusing Anthropic of flagrant piracy through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books containing lyrics and sheet music. The outcome could further shape the legal boundaries around how AI companies collect training data, a question that continues to draw intense scrutiny across the industry.