Sony Music, Warner sue Anthropic over alleged piracy campaign

Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, and numerous other music publishers have sued Anthropic and its co-founders, Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, alleging the AI lab conducted a “brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works.” The lawsuit, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was first reported by Music Business Worldwide. The publishers accuse Anthropic of “blatant theft” by using thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI model, Claude.

“We disagree with the publishers’ claims and we intend to defend ourselves robustly in court,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.

This isn’t the first intellectual-property lawsuit Anthropic has faced. Some of the same lawyers behind this case also represent Concord Music Group and Universal Music Group in a suit filed in January, and led the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which a group of authors accused Anthropic of using copyrighted works to train products like Claude. Anthropic was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in that landmark case after a judge ruled that while it was legal for the AI lab to use copyrighted works for training, it was not legal to acquire that content through piracy.

The new lawsuit makes similar arguments but is broader, building on the earlier cases. It additionally accuses Anthropic of “flagrant piracy” through illegal torrenting to obtain millions of copies of books, including ones containing lyrics and sheet music.

Why it matters

The suit adds music publishers to a growing list of copyright holders challenging how AI labs obtained the training data behind their models, and it tests whether the piracy-versus-fair-use distinction that cost Anthropic $1.5 billion in the Bartz case will hold in a new venue.