Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the US, accusing the company of using copyrighted material without permission. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are named as individual defendants in the lawsuit. The complaint alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download many pirated books, and Anthropic employees allegedly downloaded at least two million more books from the Pirate Library Mirror. Sony Music and Warner Chappell are demanding a jury trial and the destruction of copies of the copyrighted works.
Anthropic Sued by Sony Music and Warner Chappell
First reported by Music Business Worldwide, Sony Music and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division, alleging the AI company conducted intellectual property theft. The companies allege that Anthropic used illegal copies of music publishers’ works as input to train its next-generation AI assistant, Claude.
“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”, the lawsuit said.
The complaint alleges that Anthropic co-founder Benjamin Mann downloaded at least five million pirated books from Library Genesis in 2021. Anthropic employees allegedly downloaded at least another two million books from Pirate Library Mirror in 2022.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell further allege Anthropic of “scraping” music publishers’ lyrics from licensed sites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind. The complaint accuses Anthropic of “destructively scanning” millions of second-hand copies of books and of using datasets including Common Crawl, “The Pile,” and Books3.
The complaint states that Mann downloaded copies of pirated books from the Books3 library on behalf of Anthropic “to avoid the trouble of paying for them, hoping they might prove useful for training large language models (LLMs) or something else.”
Songs allegedly found in Anthropic’s training data include “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and “Paper Rings.”
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music are seeking up to $150,000 (roughly Rs. 1.43 crore) per work infringed and up to $25,000 (roughly Rs. 23.80 crore) for each violation of the Copyright Act. They are demanding a jury trial and seeking to destroy, under the Court’s supervision, all infringing copies of Music Publishers’ copyrighted works in Defendants’ possession. They are also demanding an order requiring Anthropic to provide an accounting of the training data and known capabilities of Anthropic’s AI model
