Photo Credit: Anthropic
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have launched a major legal challenge against AI company Anthropic, accusing the Claude developer of illegally harvesting tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train its artificial intelligence models. The lawsuit, filed on August 28 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, describes Anthropic’s alleged conduct as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” The complaint also names Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as individual defendants.
At the centre of the case is the allegation that Anthropic obtained copyrighted lyrics and musical works through a combination of torrenting, scraping and downloading from unauthorised sources before incorporating them into the datasets used to develop its Claude AI models. According to the publishers, the material allegedly came from sources including Library Genesis and the Pirate Library Mirror. At the same time, lyrics were also allegedly scraped from licensed platforms such as Musixmatch and LyricFind. The complaint claims that Anthropic subsequently made multiple copies of the works during the development and operation of Claude.
The lawsuit lists several famous compositions allegedly infringed, including Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.” Publishers claim Claude can reproduce copyrighted lyrics despite safeguards. Sony and Warner seek up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 per altered copyright management info, bringing potential damages to billions for tens of thousands of works. They also demand the destruction of infringing copies and a full accounting of Claude’s training data.
