Sony, Warner Sue Anthropic: "Largest IP Theft In History

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music are suing Anthropic, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." They filed a copyright infringement complaint on August 28 in California. The lawsuit also names Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann personally. The publishers accuse Anthropic of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works to build its Claude models. Songs listed in the filing include "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough," "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and "Eye of the Tiger." What's interesting is that the complaint uses findings from a previous case, Bartz v. Anthropic. In that case, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims of illegally downloading over seven million books from pirate sites. The publishers argue that the same torrenting activity also swept up their songbooks and sheet music. They cite internal messages where Mann discussed using BitTorrent for downloading. This legal action highlights the ongoing challenges around copyright and artificial intelligence development.