Sony Music and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic for allegedly pirating songs to train Claude

Music publishing companies Sony Music and Warner Music have initiated legal action against Anthropic in a California federal court. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic unlawfully used copyrighted song compositions from renowned artists such as The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Michael Jackson to train its AI model, Claude. The complaint, filed on Friday, claims that Anthropic pirated numerous song lyrics and sheet music, enabling Claude to provide responses to human prompts.

This case is part of a series of legal disputes involving copyright holders, including authors, publishers, music labels, and news outlets, who seek to protect their work from being utilized in the training of AI systems. In 2023, Universal Music Group also filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for allegedly using copyrighted song lyrics in AI training, a case that remains ongoing.

Anthropic made headlines last year by becoming the first AI company to settle one of these disputes, paying a $1.5 billion settlement to a group of authors. However, Sony and Warner Music assert that this settlement is insufficient to deter such infringing behavior from a company that has leveraged mass infringement to achieve a substantial $2-trillion-dollar valuation. Anthropic's spokespersons and representatives from Sony Music and Warner Music have not yet provided a response to requests for comment.

The lawsuit asserts that Anthropic obtained the publishers' lyrics and sheet music illicitly through torrent downloads, which were then used to train Claude. Claude is capable of reproducing copyrighted lyrics "verbatim" when given a prompt. Sony and Warner Music also contend that Anthropic employed these lyrics to teach Claude to generate "vast quantities of purportedly 'new' AI-generated song lyrics" which compete with the legitimate copyrighted works of music publishers, posing a detrimental threat to their market.

The labels are seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each infringed copyright and a court order prohibiting Anthropic from utilizing their works.