Sony Music and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic

The companies call it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” The companies call it “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” Sony Music and Warner Chappell havefiled suit against Anthropicin the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for “tens of thousands” copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner’s favor and awards the maximum amount. This is just the latest high-profile suit against Anthropic, which recently settled a suitbrought by the publishing industryfor$1.5 billion. It’s alsofacedmultiplelawsuitsfrom Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, plus separate suits fromBMGandRound Hill Music. In addition to suing Anthropic as an entity, the complaint names Co-Founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent todownload over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more fromPirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels. According tothe filing: Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history. Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s “Claude” series of artificial intelligence (“AI”) models. Specific songs named as being found in Anthropic’s training data include Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and TaylorSwift’s “Paper Rings.” Antrhopic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A free daily digest of the news that matters most. This is the title for the native ad