Sony and Warner Sue Anthropic for Intellectual Property Theft

Sony Music and Warner Chappell Music have sued Anthropic and its co-founders for stealing their music to train its Anthropic’s models. The complaint mirrors other complaints against Anthropic and other Big AI and Big Tech companies from news publishers, authors, and others.

“Plaintiff Music Publishers, a group of the world’s leading music publishers, bring this action to hold accountable the culprits behind one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” the lawsuit reads. “Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s Claude series of artificial intelligence (AI) models.”

Sounds about right.

The music publishers say that Anthropic “harvested innumerable copyrighted works” in “blatant violation of copyright law” and then “systematically copied” them multiple times to train its models and “inflicted immense harm on Music Publishers and the songwriters they proudly represent.” They further claim that these acts can no longer be hidden and are “well-documented.”

As the lawsuit notes, another district court recently described Anthropic’s actions as “straightforward piracy but at massive scale,” which is perhaps the most accurate description of the AI industry imaginable. As with the book copying case that Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion–“the cost of doing business,” this suit alleges, and “not large enough to deter infringing conduct”–the music publishers say that Anthropic engaged in a “mass campaign of illegal torrenting” to steal their intellectual property.

The publishers are seeking discovery rights to determine the full scale of this theft, and they would like to see Anthropic pay damages of $150,000 per willfully infringed work and $25,000 for the each instance in which Anthropic removed copyright management information from each work.

Anthropic is hoping to go public soon and reportedly seeks a valuation of about $2 trillion.