Anthropic sued over alleged theft of ‘tens of thousands’ of songs

A multibillion-dollar lawsuit has been filed against AI company Anthropic for allegedly stealing "tens of thousands" of copyrighted songs to train its Claude models. Music publishers Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are seeking damages in the case, which was filed in a California court and names Anthropic, its CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants.

The publishers claim the defendants used "torrenting, scraping and downloading" of copyrighted works to create the Claude models, as well as reproducing the lyrics in responses to user prompts. The lawsuit includes claims that Anthropic downloaded at least 7 million copies of books, including song lyrics and sheet music, from pirate websites.

The music publishers also allege that Anthropic used lyrics from legal sites like Musixmatch and LyricFind, as well as datasets on archive sites such as Common Crawl. The publishers are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work and $25,000 for each removal or alteration of identifying data, with the total potential damages running into billions of dollars. Anthropic has denied the allegations and said it will defend itself in court.