Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging a 'brazen campaign' of intellectual property theft. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic illegally torrented, scraped, and downloaded copyrighted works to train its AI model Claude. The case was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. Anthropic has not yet commented on the allegations. The lawsuit builds on previous legal actions against the company, including the landmark Bartz case where Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion for using pirated content to train its AI models.
The current lawsuit accuses Anthropic of 'flagrant piracy' through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including those containing lyrics and sheet music. It is described as particularly broad and expands on earlier cases, including those involving Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group. The same legal team representing these music companies is also involved in the current case. The lawsuit highlights the ongoing legal challenges Anthropic faces regarding the use of copyrighted material in its AI training processes.
The case underscores the growing tensions between AI developers and content creators over the use of copyrighted works in training models. The publishers argue that while it is legal to use copyrighted works, acquiring them through piracy is not. This lawsuit is part of a broader pattern of legal action against Anthropic for alleged intellectual property violations.
Source: techcrunch
