- Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued AI firm Anthropic for copyright infringement.
- Anthropic allegedly scraped and downloaded tens of thousands of copyrighted music works.
- The lawsuit names Anthropic founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants.
AI giant Anthropic is the target of a significant copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music.
The Claude inventor is accused of engaging in a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading" tens of thousands of copyrighted music compositions, lyrics, and sheet music in order to train its AI models.
The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named as defendants in the action in addition to the corporation.
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In their case, which was filed on Friday, Sony and Warner claimed that Anthropic had stolen hundreds of song lyrics and sheet music from artists such as Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, The Beatles, and hundreds more in order to teach Claude to react to human cues, according to a report by Reuters.
The action is the most recent in a string of lawsuits filed by copyright holders against tech corporations for using their creations to train AI systems. These owners include authors, publishers, music labels, and news organisations.
Anthropic was sued by Universal Music Group (UMG.AS) in 2023 for allegedly using copyrighted song lyrics in AI training. The lawsuit is still pending.
Last year, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors, making it the first AI company to do so.
According to Sony and Warner's complaint, "Anthropic clearly considers that to be just the cost of doing business given that its entire business model continues to be built on copyright theft."
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"And $1.5 billion is obviously not a large enough settlement to deter infringing conduct by a company that has parlayed such mass infringement into a staggering $2-trillion-dollar valuation."
The ongoing conflict between generative AI developers and traditional media publishers has significantly increased as a result of this action.
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