Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic Over Copyrighted Music Used to Train Claude

According to The Verge, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages for the use of "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works. The plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, scraped, and distributed copyrighted material on a large scale to develop and train its Claude series of AI models. They are seeking up to $150,000 per work in damages, plus an additional $25,000 for each instance of removal of identifiable copyright data. In addition to suing Anthropic, the complaint names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The lawsuit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over 5 million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror. The complaint also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind. This comes shortly after Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement with the publishing industry over another lawsuit, while also facing multiple suits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, as well as separate actions from BMG and Round Hill Music.